Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (18 page)

“East,” the Hawk said evasively.

“Where east?”
Orris persisted, not taking the hint.

She abandoned tact. “Does it matter?”

“In a way of speaking, it does,” the young man said earnestly, leaning forward with his hands on his cocked-up knees. “You see, we’re bound for Pergemis, with a pack train of fox and beaver pelts and opals and onyx from the North. We’ve met trouble on the road before this—the man we took with us was killed five nights ago by wolves. If there’s more trouble with bandits along the way, we stand to lose all the summer’s profits. Now, I make no doubt you’re a fighter, which we could do with; and neither of us is so bad at it himself, which Miss Fawn could do with. If you were bound toward the south . . . ”

Starhawk hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “We aren’t,” she said. Pergemis lay where the Bight washed up against the feet of the massive tablelands that surrounded the Kanwed
Mountains, far to the southwest of Grimscarp. She continued, “But our road lies with yours as far as Foonspay. That will get us out of the mountains and out of the worst of the snow country. If you have no objection, we’ll join you that far.”

“Done,” Orris said, pleased; then the light died from his honest, slab-sided face, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re not ever bound for Racken Scrag, are you, lass? It’s a bad business, all through that country, mixing with the Wizard King.”

“So I’ve heard,” Starhawk replied noncommittally.

When she said no more, but returned to cleaning the blood from the handle of her dagger, Orris grew fidgety and went on. “Two girls traveling about alone . . . ”

“Would probably be in a lot of danger,” she agreed. “But it happens I’ve killed quite a few men in my time . . . ” She tested the dagger blade with her thumb. “And since I could probably give you five years, I’d hardly qualify as a lass.”

“Yes, lass, but . . . ”

At this point, Ram kicked him—no gentle effort—and the two brothers relapsed into jovial bickering, leaving Starhawk to her silent thoughts.

In the days that followed, she had cause to be thankful for their partnership, for all that the brothers periodically drove her crazy with their fits of chivalry. Orris never ceased trying to find out the women’s destination and objectives, not from any malice but, what was worse, out of the best of intentions to dissuade them from doing anything foolish or dangerous. Starhawk admitted to herself that their journey was both foolish and dangerous, but that fact did not make it any less necessary, if they were going to find and aid Sun Wolf and learn what, if any, designs Altiokis had toward the rest of the troop. Orris’ automatic assumption that, having met them only a day or so ago and being completely in ignorance of the reasons for their quest, he was nevertheless better qualified than they to judge its lightness and its possibilities of success alternately amused Starhawk and irritated her almost past bearing.

Likewise, the brothers’ good-natured arguments and insults could be carried far past the point of being entertaining. When they weren’t poking fun at each other’s appearance, brains, or social manners, they joined verbally to belabor Uncle Anyog for his habit of reciting poetry as he walked, for his small size, or for his flights of rhetorical eloquence, all of which Anyog took in good part. Around the campfires in the evenings, the brothers listened, as enthralled as Fawn and the Hawk were, to the little man’s tales of heroes and dragons and to the silver magic of his songs. Years in the war camps had given Starhawk an enormous tolerance for the brothers’ brand of bovine wit, but she found herself more than once wishing that she could trade either or both of them for a half hour of absolute silence.

But, she reasoned, hers was not to choose her companions. Noisy, busy blockheads like the brothers and the hyperloquacious Anyog were far preferable to travelling through the mountains in winter alone.

The Peacock Inn, when they reached it, was deserted, with snow drifting through the windows of its shattered common room. In the stable, Starhawk discovered the bones of a horse, chewed, broken, and crusted with frost, but clearly fresh; the splintered shutters and doors of the ground floor had scarcely been weathered. With thick powder snow squeaking under her boots, she waded back across the yard. In the common room, she found Fawn and Uncle Anyog, huddled together, looking uneasily about them and breathing like dragons in the fading daylight. Orris and Ram came down the slippery drifts of the staircase.

“Nothing above stairs,” Orris reported briefly. “The door at the top’s been scratched and pounded, but no signs that it was forced. Whatever’s done this it’s gone now; but we’d probably be safer spending the night up there.”

“Will the mules go up the steps?” Starhawk asked. She told them what she’d found in the stables. There were six mules, besides her own little donkey.

Orris started to object and lay out a schedule for double watches on the stable, but Ram said, “Nay, we’d best have ’em up with us. If any ill fell to ’em, we’d be fair put to it between here and Foonspay, never mind leaving behind the pelts and things.”

It was a stupid and ridiculous way to spend an evening, Starhawk thought, shoving and coaxing seven wholly recalcitrant creatures up into the chambers usually reserved for their social superiors. Uncle Anyog helped her, with vivid and startlingly elaborate curses—the elderly scholar was more agile than he looked—while Orris and Ram set to with shovels to clear a place around the hearth for cooking, and Fawn gathered straw bedding in the stables and kindling in the yard.

As night settled over the frozen wastes of the mountains and they barricaded themselves into the upper storey of the inn, Starhawk found herself feeling moody and restless, prey to an uneasy sense of danger. The brothers’ boisterousness did nothing to improve her temper, nor did the grave lecture Orris gave her on the necessity for them all to keep together. As usual, she said nothing of either her apprehension or her irritation. Only Ram glanced up when she left early for her watch. Fawn and Orris were too deeply immersed in a lively discussion of the spice trade to notice her departure.

The silence of the dark hallway was like water after a long fever. She checked the mules where they were stabled in the best front bedroom, then followed the feeble glow of the tallow dip to the head of the stairs, where Uncle Anyog sat before the locked door.

His bright eyes sparkled as he saw her. “Ah, in good time, my warrior dove. Trust a professional to be on time for her watch. Are my oxen bedded down?”

“You think Orris would shut his eyes when he has an audience to listen to his schemes for financing a venture to the East?”

Though she spoke with her usual calm, the old man must have caught some spark of bitterness in her words, for he smiled up at her wryly. “Our pecuniary and busy-handed child.” He sighed. “All the way from Kwest Mralwe, through the woods of Swyrmlaedden, where the nightingales sing, through the golden velvet hills of Harm, and across the snow-shawled feet of the Mountains of Ambersith, he favored me with the minutest details of the latest fluctuations of the currency of the Middle Kingdoms.” He sighed again with regret. “That’s our Orris. But he is very good at what he is, you know.”

“Oh, I know.” Starhawk folded her long legs under her and sat beside him, her back braced against the stained plaster of the wall. “To make a great deal of money, a person has to think about money a great deal of the time. I suppose that’s why, in all the years I’ve been paid so handsomely, I’m never much ahead. No mercenary is.”

The salt-and-pepper beard split in a wide smile. “But you are far ahead of them in the memory of joy, my dove,” he said. “And those memories are not affected by currency fluctuations. I was an itinerant scholar all over the world, from the azure lagoons of Mandrigyn to the windy cliffs of the West, until I became too old and they made me be an itinerant teacher, instead—and I’ve been paid fortunes by universities of Kwest Mrawle and Kedwyr and half the Middle Kingdoms. Now here I am, returning in my old age to be a pensioner in my sister’s house in Pergemis, to stay with a girl whose only knowledge ever lay in how to add, subtract, and raise big, wayfaring sons.” He shook his head with a regret that was only partially self-mockery. “There is no justice in the world, my dove.”

“Stale news, professor.”
The Hawk sighed.

“I fear you’re right.” Uncle Anyog extended one booted toe to nudge the stout wood of the door. “You saw the marks on the other side?”

She nodded. Neither Ram nor Orris had identified them.

She herself had seen their like only once before, as a small child. “Nuuwa?”

He nodded, the stiff white petals of his ruff bobbing, catching an edge of the light like an absurd flower. “More than one, I should say. Quite a large band, if they were capable of breaking into the inn.”

Starhawk’s face was grave. “I’ve never heard of them running in bands.”

“Haven’t you?” Anyog leaned forward to prick up the tallow dip that sat in a tin cup between them on the floor. His shadow, huge and distorted, bent over him, like the darkness of some horrible destiny. “They get thicker as you go east—didn’t you know? And they’ve been seen in bands since early last summer in all the lands around the Tchard
Mountains.”

She glanced sideways at him, wondering how much he knew or guessed of her destination. Down below in the inn, she could hear the soft scrabbling noises of foxes and weasels quarreling over the garbage of dinner. For some reason, the sound made her shudder.

“Why is that?” she asked, when the silence had begun to prickle along her skin. “You’re a scholar, Anyog. What are nuuwa? Is it true that they used to be men? That something—some sickness—causes them to lose their eyes, to change and distort as they do? I hear bits and pieces about them, but no one seems to know anything for certain. The Wolf says that they used to appear only rarely and singly. Now you tell me that they’re coming out of the East in big bands.”

“The Wolf?”
The little man raised one tufted eyebrow inquiringly.

“The man I’m—Fawn and I—are seeking,” Starhawk explained unwillingly.

“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.

“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.