Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (32 page)

No wonder the Wolf had always steered clear of love. She wondered how she could ever find the courage to tell him that she loved him and what he would say when or if she did.

And with love, she found herself involved in magic as well.

“Why did you never go on to become a wizard?” she asked one evening, watching Anyog as he brought fire spurting to the little heap of sticks and kindling with a gesture of his bony fingers. “Was it fear of Altiokis alone?”

The bright, black eyes twinkled up at her, catching the glittering reflection of the sparks. “Funk—pure and simple.” He held out his hands to the blaze. The light seemed to shine through them, so thin they were. The white ruffles at his wrists, like those at his throat, were draggled and gray.

Starhawk eyed him for a moment, where he hunched like a cricket over the little blaze, then half glanced over her shoulder at the dark that always seemed to hang over the uplands to the north.

He read her gesture and grinned wryly. “Not solely of our deathless friend,” he explained. “Though I will admit that that consideration loomed largest in my mind when I deserted the master who taught me and took the road for sunnier climes in the south.

“My master was an old man, a hermit who lived in the hills. Even as a little boy, I knew I had the Power—I could find things that were lost or start fires by looking at bits of dried grass. I could see things that other people could not see. This old man was a mystic—crazy, some said—but he taught me—”

Anyog paused, staring into the shivering color of the blaze. “Perhaps he taught me more than he knew.

“I tasted it then, you see.” He glanced up at her, standing above him, across the leaping light; the fire touched in his face every wrinkle and line of gaiety and dissipation. “Tasted glory—tasted magic—and tasted what that glory would cost. He was a shy old man, terrified of strangers. I had to hunt for him for two weeks before he would even see me. He distrusted everything, everyone—all from fear of Altiokis.”

Starhawk was silent, remembering that whitewashed cell in the distant Convent and the mirror set in an angle of its walls. Somewhere in the woods an owl hooted, hunting on soundless wings. The horses stamped at their tethers, pawing at the crusted snow.

The dark eyes were studying her face, wondering if she understood. “It meant giving up all things for only one thing,” Anyog said. “Even then I knew I wanted to travel, to learn. I loved the small, bright beauties of the mind. What is life without poetry, without wit, without music? Without the well-turned phrase and the sharpening of your own philosophy upon the philosophies of others? My master lived hidden—he would go for years without seeing another soul. If I became a wizard like him, it would mean the same kind of life for me.”

The old man sighed and turned to pick up the iron spits and begin setting them in their place over the fire. “So I chose all those small beauties over the great, single, lonely one. I became a scholar, teacher, dancer, poet—my Song of the Moon Dog and the Ocean Child will be sung throughout the Middle Kingdoms long after I am gone—and I pretended I did not regret. Until that night at the inn, when you asked me if my safety had bought me happiness. And I could not say that it had.”

He looked away from her and occupied himself in spitting pieces of the rabbit she had shot that afternoon on the long iron cooking spike. Starhawk said nothing, but hunted through the mule’s packs for barley bannocks and a pan to melt snow for drinking water. She was remembering the warm safety of Pel Farstep’s house and how she had not even thought twice about leaving it to pursue her quest.

“And then,” Anyog continued, “I feared the Great Trial. Without passing through that, I could never have come to the fullness of my power in any case.”

“What is it?” Starhawk asked, sitting down opposite him. “Could you take it now, before we reached Grimscarp?”

The old man shook his head; she thought the withered muscles of his jaw tightened in apprehension in the flickering firelight. “No,” he said. “I never learned enough magic to withstand it, and what I learned . . . It has been long since I used that. The Trial kills the weak, as it kills those who are not mageborn.”

She frowned. “But if you passed through it—would it make you deathless, like Altiokis?”

“Altiokis?”
The winged brows plunged down suddenly over his nose. For an instant she saw him, not as a half-sick and regretful little old man, but as a wizard, an echo of the Power he had passed by. “Pah. Altiokis never passed the Great Trial. According to my master, he never even knew what it was. My master knew him, you see. Vain, lazy, trifling . . . the worst of them all.”

He might have been a classical poet speaking of the latest popular serenade writer. She half smiled. “But you’ve got to admit he’s up there and you’re down here, hiding from him. He’s got to have acquired that power from somewhere.”

Anyog’s voice sank, as if he feared that, this close to the Citadel of the Wizard King, the very winds would hear. “He has,” he told her quietly.

Her glance sharpened, and she remembered the smoky darkness of the inn at Foonspay and the old man’s raving quietly before the sinking fire, with Fawn standing quiet, hidden in the shadows of the corridor. “You spoke of that before,” she said.

“Did I? I didn’t mean to.” He poked the fire, more for something to do than because it needed stirring. The wind brought the voices of wolves from the hills above, sweet and distant upon the hunting trail. “My master knew it—but very few others did. If Altiokis ever found out that it was known, he would guess that my master had taught others. He would find me.”

“Where does Altiokis get his power?”

Anyog was silent for a time, staring into the fire, and Starhawk wondered if he would answer her at all. She had just decided that he would not when he said softly, “From the Hole. Holes in the world, they are called—but I think Holes between worlds would be more accurate. For it is said that something lives in them—something other than the gaums that eat men’s brains.”

“Gaums . . . ” she began.

“Oh, yes. My nephews call them after dragonflies, but they’re things—whatever they are—that come out of the Holes. They are mindless, and they eat the minds of their victims, so that their victims become mindless, too—nuuwa, in fact. The Holes appear—oh, at intervals of hundreds of years, sometimes. My master said they were ruled by the courses of the stars. Sunlight destroys them—they appear at night and vanish with the coming of dawn.”

Something moved, dark against the mottled background of broken snow and old pine needles; Anyog looked up with a gasp, as if at an enemy footfall, and Starhawk, following his gaze, saw the brief green flash of a weasel’s eyes. The old man subsided, shivering and rubbing his hands.

At length he continued. “The Holes vanish with sunlight—as do the gaums, if they don’t find a victim first. But this Hole Altiokis sheltered. He is said to have built a stone hut over it in a single night, and from that time his powers have grown. It animates his flesh, giving him life—but he has changed since then. I don’t know.” He shook his head wearily, a harried, sick old man once more. “He had only to wait for the great mages of his own generation to die and to kill off those who followed before they came to greatness. As he will kill me.”

His voice was shaky with exhaustion and despair; looking at him across the topaz glow of the fire, Starhawk saw how white he looked, how darkly the crazy eyebrows stood out against the pinched flesh. As if he’d been a boy trooper, funked before his first battle, she said hearteningly, “He won’t kill you.”

They left the magical silence of the foothills, to climb the Stren
Water
Valley.

Fed by the drowning rains on the uplands above, the Stren Water roared in full spate, spreading its channels throughout the narrow, marshy country that lay between the higher cliffs, cutting off hilltops to islands, and driving those farmers who eked their living from its soil to their winter villages on the slopes above. Starhawk and Anyog made their way along the rocky foothills that bordered the flooded lands, always wet, always cold. Anyog told tales and sang songs; of wizardry and Altiokis, they did not speak.

They made a dozen river crossings a day—sometimes of boggy little channels of the main flood, sometimes of boiling white streams that had permanent channels. At one of these, they lost the packs and almost lost the mule as well. Starhawk suspected that the struggle with the raging waters had broken something within Anyog; after that, he had a white look about the mouth that never left him and he could not travel more than a few miles without a rest.

She had always been a blisteringly efficient commander, using her own supple strength to drive and bully her men to follow. But she found that her fears for Sun Wolf, though unabated, left room for a care for the old man, who she was sure now would never be able to help her, and she broke the journey to give him a day’s rest while she hunted mountain sheep in the high rock country to the northwest.

She was coming back from this when she found the tracks of the mercenaries.

It had been a small band—probably not more than fifteen, she guessed, studying the sloppy trail in the fading afternoon light. Their mere presence in the valley told her they were out of work and had been so for at least three months, since the rains had begun, holed up somewhere, living off the land by hunting or pillage—too small a group to be hired for anything but tribal war between the Thanes; and most of the Thanes in these parts hadn’t the money to hire, anyway, and wouldn’t go to war in the winter if they could.

Starhawk cursed. Her experience with out-of-work mercenaries was that they were always a nuisance and generally robbers to boot; she would have to trail them to make sure where they were headed and what they were up to before she would feel safe returning to camp.

She had shot a sheep in the high rocks, one of the small, shaggy crag jumpers, and was carrying the carcass over her shoulders. She hung it from the limb of a tree to keep it from wolves and hung her coat up with it; she might want her arms free. Then she transferred her sword from her back, where she’d been carrying it on the hunt, to her hip, restrung her bow, and checked her arrows. She had been a mercenary for a long time—she was under no illusions about her own kind.

The trail was fresh; the droppings of the few horses still steamed in the cold evening. She found the place where they’d turned aside from the main trail through the hills at the sight of Anyog’s campfire—she could still see the smoke of it herself, rising through the trees from the wooded hollow where she’d left him. As she clambered cautiously down the rocks that skirted the downward trail, she began to hear their voices, too, and their laughter.

She muttered words that did greater credit to her imagination than to her convent training. They wanted horses, of course. She hoped to the Mother that Anyog had more sense than to antagonize them—not that anything would be likely to help him much, if they were drunk—which, by the sound of it, they were.

She’d chosen the campsite carefully—a wooded dell surrounded by thin trees with a minimum of large boulders, difficult to spy into and impossible to sneak up on. She pressed her body to the trunk of the largest available tree and looked down into the dell.

There were about a dozen men, and they were drunk. One or two of them she thought she recognized—mercenaries were always crossing one another’s paths, and most of them got to know one another by sight. The leader was a squat, hairy man in a greasy doublet sewn over with iron plates. It was before him that Anyog knelt on hands and knees, his gray head bowed and trickling with blood.

At this distance it was hard to hear what the leader was saying, but it was obvious the robbers had already appropriated the livestock. Starhawk could see the two horses and the mule among the small cavy of broken-down nags at the far edge of the clearing; the camp was strewn with cooking gear, and a couple of snaggle-haired camp followers stood among the half circle of men with her and Anyog’s bedrolls. She barely felt her anger in the midst of her calculations. The horses were unguarded at the rear of the cavy, since most of the men were up front, watching the fun with Anyog. The animals would provide better cover if she could get to them.

More laughter burst from the circle of men; a couple of them jostled for a better position. She saw the leader’s hand move, and Anyog began to crawl, evidently after something thrown into the muddy pine needles. Bawling with laughter, the mercenary captain reached out his boot and kicked the old man in the side, sending him sprawling. Doggedly, Anyog got back to his hands and knees and continued to crawl.

Starhawk was familiar with the game; paying for the horses, it was called. A player threw coppers at greater and greater distances and made the poor bastard crawl after them while everyone kicked him over. The game was on a par with ducking the mayor of the village, or forcing his wife to clean the captain’s boots with her hair—the sort of thing that went on during the sacking of a town. It was hilariously funny if a person was drunk, of course, or had just survived a battle that could have left him feeding the local cats on his spilled guts.

But sober, and watching it played on a man who had done her nothing but kindness, she felt both anger and distaste. It was, she saw, akin to rape; and like rape, it could easily get out of hand and end with the victim dead as well.

She began to edge her way through the trees toward the far side of the cavy. The gathering darkness helped her—it had been blackly overcast all day, with snow falling lightly in the high country where she had hunted; the world smelled of rain and frost. The men, moreover, aside from being drunk, were totally engrossed in their game. Anyog was kicked down again and lay where he had fallen. It was hard to tell in the twilight, but Starhawk thought he was bleeding from the mouth. She decided then that, whether or not they offered him further injury, she would kill them. One of the camp followers, a slut of sixteen or so, walked over to the old man and kicked him to make him get up; Starhawk saw his hands move as he struggled to rise.