No room to keep horses there – stupid anyway in wolf country – or prisoners, either… He has to have another base elsewhere.
But from here he could cross to Ilfagen in a couple of hours.
He had planned to reconnoiter the campsite from a distance, then sneak in (And now’s when we find out how well that Nobody-Here spell REALLY works…) and have a quiet word with the Raptor about How much do you really want to have a magic-worker knowing that YOU know the truth about that dragon? But as he worked his way down one of the narrow trails that led to the beach, Sun Wolf smelled the smoke of only a single fire, and when he came in view of the beach itself, saw it empty of boats.
Crap.
He scrambled up the trail, found the track leading down to the camp ledge. Damn it, damn it, damn it…
A man’s voice below said, very clearly, “You gonna play those goddam cards or sit there scratchin’ your arse all night?”
“Piss on you.”
There’s Nobody Here. There’s Nobody Here…
He moved like a ghost down the trail.
A dozen tents hugged the cliff. Only one boasted a fire burned in front it. Systematically, Sun Wolf checked the others (There’s Nobody Here…), and found in one of them empty jars that smelled of sulphur, quicklime and other flammable substances, and the broken pieces of the kind of pump armies used for spraying burning naphtha at their foes. There was also, wrapped rudely in sacking, an enormous thing like a lizard’s foot, wrought of wood, leather, and iron.
Sun Wolf’s father had always told him – when that brutal and thick-sinewed northern warrior had beaten his son for lying – “If you’re going to tell a lie, make it a good one.”
And The Black Goon – the first mercenary captain with whom the Wolf had signed on at the age of sixteen after his father had been killed in a tribal raid – had dispensed another, equally valuable, instruction concerning untruth: “Don’t ever trust anyone else to tell your lies for you. Especially not for money.”
Martus – or probably Nanya – got word to them that I’m asking questions.
They’re going to hit the palace tonight.
The sun stood a hand span below the half-way point, above the green-roofed towers of Ilfagen. The Hawk – hopefully still hiding in some store-room or attic or stable loft – could hold them off for a time, but how strong a mage was Nanya? Strong enough to fling flash-spells or fire while keeping alive the illusion of the dragon? Against a warrior not possessed of magic, in the heat of battle even a small spell would be enough.
He quickened his pace through the deep bracken between the trees, seeing his heart the Raptor’s men unloading jars of naphtha, packets of blasting powder, from their small boats in some inconspicuous cove north of the city. Seeing Martus locking the doors between the upper and lower palace. Drugging the Queen’s servants…
Seeing Nanya, eyes closed, hair unbound, sinking herself into the meditation to call the image of the dragon…
He broke into a run, scrambled down the little dip of land where he had left the horse.
And the horse was gone.
*
Oh, crap.
Sun Wolf dove for cover in the bracken but he knew already that a guard had been posted, not to watch the trail-head to the beach (Nanya would tell them I could make myself unseen…) but to search the woods for a horse, and to watch it.
They came at him from two sides, big men and tough. He knew he wasn’t good enough to be unseen by someone who was watching for him, and clearly the Raptor hadn’t relegated the job to the low-ranking men of his company. Sun Wolf had his sword in one hand, fighting-dagger in the other and his back to a tree before they even reached him, cutting, blocking, trying to pull together the words and power of a flash-spell and fumbling at it.
He took a cut across the wrist through a split-instant’s inattention; then gave up all thought of magic and just pretended he’d never heard of it. That he was just a bone-headed barbarian from the North, trained to kill.
That actually worked much better.
While wiping his sword-blade on the second corpse’s sleeve he heard men coming from the trail-head – the two who’d been at the camp. This time he was able to collect his thoughts, fade out of sight behind a clump of mountain laurel. The men cursed, exclaimed over the two corpses, and – like idiots – split up to look for him. Sun Wolf was not a believer in leaving anyone at his back who could cause trouble for him later.
He got about ten silver pieces among the four corpses, enough to take care of the boat problem back to the mainland. There was probably more back down in the camp, but he hadn’t seen any sign of horses. In wolf country like this you were asking for trouble corralling them at the top of the cliff, and there was no room on the narrow shelf of the camp. Left ‘em in town, he reflected, and come and go by boat…
Which they’d taken all of, pox rot their ancestors’ tripes.
He started back for Senat at a forced-march jog, knowing it would be sunset before he arrived.
Cursing Martus Dragonslayer and Nanya of the Butterflies at every step.
They can’t start the attack until fairly late. People will be coming and going between town and the palace for the first couple hours after dark; too many witnesses.
With ten silver it wasn’t going to be easy to get even a fisherman to set out across the Strait by moonlight.
The cattle in the sun-drenched fields gazed at him with mild, stupid inquiry as he jogged past.
The Hawk can take care of herself til I get there. He’d seen towns the Raptor and his men had sacked.
They’re being paid, not to let witnesses live.
The town gates of Senat were shut. Dusk had fallen; the urge to simply brain the gatekeeper rather than patiently negotiate a bribe to get in was almost overwhelming: No, I’m not a thief. (You think I’d tell you if I was?) Yes, I’m here on respectable business. The damn mercs out by Gull Cove stole my horse, is why I’m showing up at this hour, you puling idiot…
The harbor. Five taverns before he found a sober coast-trader willing to put out by moonlight, and then another two before they rounded up his cousins to work the sails.
Moonlight. Sea-spray. Chop on the reefs of rocks that at low tide poked like little rims of teeth above an ocean the hue of black sapphires. The creak of rigging-ropes and, infinitely far off, the lights of Ilfagen like a sprinkle of luminous sand.
When I get back to the north the first thing I’m looking up to study is how to summon wind at sea.
The tiny golden dots seemed to come no nearer. A few at a time, they began to go out, as honest men and women sought their beds.
“You’ll not find a door open,” warned Captain Borakus, as they drew near the harbor. “Whatever was so bloody important that you get here tonight—”
“Shut up and take us in.” From his post at one of the oars – Borakus’s cousin-crewman had proved too drunk to manage – Sun Wolf scanned the wharves, thanking his ancestors that the rumor of the dragon had kept the quays three-quarters empty. There was barely moonlight enough to make out the black shapes of masts, the crooked roof-lines along the street. The walls of the upper town loomed against the stars, and above them the towers of the palace. And I’d better not run into the Watch on my way up to the palace gates…
Red-gold fire, blinding in its suddenness, flared from the towers. A mountain of smoke that caught the light…
The crewman at the other oar screamed, “It’s the dragon!”
And it was.
Bursting from the smoke, spewing fire from its mouth and its eyes, it hung above the palace turrets, fat, bronze, gaudy and clumsy and for all the world exactly like the dragon lamp in Nanya’s shop. Sun Wolf was shocked to discover, even knowing that it was an illusion and not a very lifelike illusion at that, in darkness and the wild-leaping crimson of the blazing palace roofs, it was nevertheless terrifying.
“Put about!” Captain Borakus yelled, and yanked the sheets to swing the sail around. Sun Wolf aba
ndoned his oar, grabbed the Captain by his shirt-front – “The hell you will!” – and both captain and the other crewman seized him. There was a moment’s struggle, then Sun Wolf was flung overboard, fifty feet from the quays. He stripped out of his sword-belt, kicked off his boots as he went down, and as his head broke the surface he cursed the man to the Cold Hells and back. By the time he dragged himself up onto the nearest wharf screams and shrieks were rising from every house the town.
The dragon had come.
As everyone had known that, sooner or later, it would.
Barefoot on the cobbles, Sun Wolf ran like a man possessed.
In the palace square, people were opening their shutters, looking out, and slamming them tight again. You couldn’t fight a dragon: the cellar was the only place to be. He kicked at the palace gate, roared a curse – shouting and commotion broiled in the gate-house and the courtyard beyond. He dashed across the square to the Widow Kubaba’s, fetched the broad-ax from the courtyard wood-pile and had hacked nearly through one of the door-planks before wicket-door opened and an elderly man – guard’s tunic, no armor, gray hair ruffled up from sleep – put his head through, expecting an army of townsfolk come to help, the more fool he…
“Let me in—”
“It’s no good,” gasped the guardsman. “The main stair’s blocked, the roof’s fallen in—”
One small charge of blasting-powder would do it…
“Backstairs?”
“Doors are jammed—”
“Can we get up a wall to one of the upper courts?” Smoke billowed thick above the courtyard, gold light and red glared from above. Now and then the terrible, screaming cry of the dragon rang out, and booming crashes as stones rained down. “You got siege-hooks in the armory? Ladders?”
To his eternal credit, the guard didn’t demand, “Who the hell are you, anyway?” of the dripping-wet stranger standing barefoot in the gateway. Only yelled back over his shoulder into the court, “Tib! Gasset! We can get ladders from the armory, get up over the garden wall—”
Good men!
The upper palace was burning – Naphtha flares and war-fire…
The guards were setting up the ladders in the kitchen-garden – under the wall of the Queen’s Garden above that gave access into the upper palace – when the dragon plunged down out of the smoke at them, bellowing its rage. Well, she’s seen us…
The men scattered for cover (You think a potting-shed is going to keep a dragon out?), but Sun Wolf braced the ladder into place, started up, the dragon – sixty feet of glittering bronze, spitting fire and snatching at him – hanging in the air behind him. It isn’t real…
He knew it wasn’t – knew that the fire it spewed against the wall above him wasn’t… for one thing it left no charring on the stone…
It still scared the life out of him.
If it’s still coming at me it means they haven’t killed the Queen and Darvi yet.
That means the Hawk is still alive defending them.
He heard the men behind him shout warnings (You think I haven’t NOTICED the dragon yet?).
Come on, you imbeciles, when are you going to notice that IT HASN’T HARMED ME…
A man’s head briefly silhouetted against the back-lit smoke above the wall, but he guessed they couldn’t throw down the ladder without the men in the court below seeing them do it. Nevertheless, when he reached a window, a few feet to his left and about ten feet short of the top of the wall, he sprang sidelong off the ladder to its sill, knocked in the glass (at two silver pieces a pane…) and slithered through. Though he still had the Widow Kubaba’s ax with him, as well as a sword one of the guardsmen had given him, it wasn’t necessary. The room – a dormitory for the Queen’s maids, it looked like – was empty, its door open, beds tumbled, curtains torn.
By the shouting he could tell where the Queen’s room was.
Rafters and walls were burning, the curtains beginning to catch. The fire would soon be out of control. He ran through the day-room beyond the dormitory and found the body of a serving-woman, stabbed through the chest and then conscientiously hacked with strokes that were supposed to mimic the claws of a dragon.
He barely glanced at it. A gallery beyond led to the Queen’s room and a dozen men clustered around a door at its end.
The Hawk’s defending the doorway. He could see the door itself had been battered off its hinges, but only one or two men could get through it at a time, and that, he guessed, was where his redoubtable second-in-command had stationed herself. He couldn’t see the Raptor, but even through the choke of the smoke fast filling the long room he recognized some of the mercenary captain’s men and, at the back of the group, Martus Dragonslayer himself.
Fully dressed in dark-blue velvet. Obviously he hadn’t been waked in surprise despite the lateness of the hour.
Hesitantly – he’d never tried this in combat before – Sun Wolf repeated the words, formed the thoughts of summoning smoke, which sometimes worked back at the farm and sometimes didn’t…
This time it did. To the point that the men began to cough, curse, look around them—
“The gods damn you, kill them!” yelled Martus. “Are you cowards?”
Yeah, almost as cowardly as a man who’d pay the Raptor’s prices to kill his wife so he could take over the kingdom…
The Wolf drew three deep breaths, gathered the smoke, the shadows, the whisper of illusion around him like a cloak. Nobody here.
And walked quietly down the length of the gallery, his borrowed sword in his hand.
Every book of magic he possessed – the ones he could read, anyway – exhorted the would-be mage never to use Power or illusion on men incapable of seeing through it. But to his mind, this was merely an extension of the arts of hunting he’d learned as a child, the arts of sneaky death that had kept him alive in ambushes. How different is what I’m doing from what Nanya of the Butterflies is doing? Using magic to cover me while I stab someone in the back?
And in any case it didn’t matter. The Hawk needed help.
He was still a yard away from Martus when a woman screamed, “Martus!” at the far end of the gallery and the Queen’s husband swung around to face him.
And looking for danger, saw him.
Sun Wolf lunged and the blinding flare of a flash-spell burst in his face. He twisted, stepped back as the younger man sprang in, slashing; heard Nanya’s footsteps racing along the gallery toward them as pain-spells – badly-formed and easy to throw off, like puppy-bites – clamped at his knees and elbows. He staggered back, still blinking at the masses of purple after-flash that swarmed his vision, blocked Martus’ blows by instinct. Men swarmed past them, scuffling, stumbling, running – it was hard to see in the smoke and firelight – and he heard Nanya scream “Come back! Come—”
The mercs were running away and she turned her head to look after them – Martus did, too. That was the split-second Sun Wolf needed and his lunge put his blade fifteen inches into the Dragonslayer’s chest and out the other side. At the same instant he heard Nanya scream – first “Martus!” and then, “Bitch!” and Sun Wolf swung around as Nanya twisted in Starhawk’s grip.
Three dead mercs lay in the doorway. They’d probably been distracted by his appearance behind Martus. No live ones remained anywhere near-by.
Her wrists still prisoned in Starhawk’s grip, Nanya screamed curses, then, in a flash of smoky light, her shape melted and became that of a dragon, human-sized but snapping and spitting heatless, illusory flame. Though Starhawk couldn’t see the illusion she must have guessed it was one – Or maybe not, this is Starhawk we’re talking about… In either case, she held onto the sorceress’ arms, even through another flash-spell, before the Wolf could reach them and grab Nanya by the hair. By that time Lord Darvi had emerged from the Queen’s room, bleeding and night-shirted and bearing a sword, with his niece behind him, her long hair hanging over her night-gowned shoulders and looking worse than homely. She carried a five-foot candle-lamp in her hands
, held like a war-pike.
Not a girl you want to mess with. No wonder Martus wanted to give her back to the dragon.
“He made me!” Transformed back into her rightful appearance (except that Sun Wolf could tell by the feel of it that her hair wasn’t actually red), Nanya sank to her knees at his feet, weeping, clinging to his wrist. “He has my parents prisoner, and my child. He said he would kill them. Please, please, forgive me…”
Queen Caia lowered her makeshift weapon, looked down at the weeping girl.
“Oh, like punk he does.” The Raptor sat up painfully in the bedroom doorway, holding one hand over the spreading blot of gore in his side. Starhawk – bleeding herself, the Wolf now saw, from a slashed arm and what looked like an arrow-graze on her temple – had clearly had an energetic several minutes after the mercs had finally broken down the bedroom door. “You send over to Gwenth and ask for her ma, and anybody in the town’ll point you to her inn. The Jolly Queen… Only don’t eat the sausages if you know what’s good for you.”
Nanya’s face twisted with anger, and she made a sweeping gesture with one hand. The Raptor rolled out of the way as a section of burning rafter collapsed above his head, and the next second the roof over Sun Wolf’s gave way with a shower of sparks. He grabbed the Hawk’s hand, jerked her out from beneath its path, and by the time they’d gathered up the wounded Raptor and retreated, panting in the smoke, to the gallery door, Nanya Butterfly was gone.
“My lord!” gasped the gray-haired guardsman, as a squad of belated troopers crowded in through the gallery door. “My lady!”
Nanya of the Butterflies (Sun Wolf and Starhawk) Page 4