Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (37 page)

He braced his body, then began to reach upward, rising on his toes and stretching his stiff back and shoulders toward the iron hook.

The nuuwa stared stolidly at the walls to either side of him.

Delicately, he hooked the tips of his half-numbed fingers under the short links that joined the metal bracelets. He strained to lift them toward the tip of the hook, loosening his back muscles against the shooting fire of cramps that raced down them from their long inactivity. The sweat burned in the raw flesh of his opened cheek, and his arms trembled at the effort of movement. The tip of the hook seemed impossibly high. One of the nuuwa belched, the sound sharp as an explosion in the silent room; half hypnotized by the effort of concentration, the Wolf never took his mind from the illusion of nonvisibility that he held with his whole attention, despite the physical strain that occupied his limbs. He had been trapped once by having his concentration broken. Even if they tore him to pieces, he would not do so again.

The metal slipped over metal. The slacking of the hook’s support was abrupt, as the links slid over it. The Wolf felt as if all the weight of his body had dropped suddenly upon his exhausted muscles. He could have collapsed in a thankful heap on the fetid straw, but he forced himself to remain upright, lowering his arms slowly to his sides, shaking all over with the effort. The separate agonies of the day were swallowed in an all-encompassing wave of anguishing cramps in arms and back.

The nuuwa continued to look at the wall.

As soon as he was satisfied that his legs would support him, Sun Wolf took a cautious step forward.

There was no reaction.

His mind held their attention at bay, but the concentration required most of his strength, and he knew he could not keep it up for long. He took another step and another, without either of them appearing to notice . . . No mean feat, he thought in that clear cynical corner of his mind, to keep a nuuwa from going after ambulatory food.

The door was bolted with an iron dead bolt, not merely a wooden drop that could be lifted with a card. He glanced over his shoulder at the nuuwa, the nearest of which stood, a stinking lump of flesh, less than six feet from him.

He decided to risk it.

“Dark Eagle!” he yelled, lifting his raw voice to as carrying a pitch as he could manage. “Stirk! I’ll tell you what you want to know! Just keep them off me!”

His concentration pressed against the nuuwa, a sheer physical effort, like that of trying to hold up a falling wall. The nuuwa shifted, scuffling around the cell, arms swinging, lolling heads wagging, as if seeking for what they could not find. Rot your eyes, you poxy corridor guard, he thought, don’t you want to be the first with the news that your prisoner’s broken?

He yelled again. “I’ll tell you anything! Just get me out of here! I’ll tell you what you want!”

Running footsteps sounded in the corridor. One man, he guessed from the sound, hesitating outside the door. Open it, you cowardly bastard!
the Wolf demanded silently. Don’t call your chief . . . 

The bolt shot back.

Sun Wolf came slamming out of the cell, throwing his full weight on the door, heedless of any weapon the man might have had. The guard’s drawn short sword jammed in the wood of the door and stuck; the man had his mouth open, too startled to scream, showing a wide expanse of dirty teeth. Sun Wolf grabbed him by the neck and hurled him bodily into the arms of the advancing nuuwa.

He sent the door crashing shut and shot the bolt against the man’s screams, pulled the sword free, and ran up the empty corridor as if heading for the half-closed doors of Hell.

“And you turned their minds aside?”

Sun Wolf nodded. Yirth’s drugs could ease pain without dulling the mind, but the release of concentration acted almost like a drug in itself. Lying in the fading light of her tiny whitewashed attic room, he felt as exhausted as he did after battle. The smell of the place, of the drying herbs that festooned the low rafters in strings, filled him with a curious sense of peace, and he watched her moving around, gaunt and powerful, and wondered how he had ever thought of her as ugly. Stern and strong in her power, yes. But the marring birthmark no longer drew his eyes from the rest of her face, and he saw her now as a harsh-faced woman a few years older than he, whose life had been, in its way, as strenuous as his own.

As if she felt his thoughts, she turned back to him. “How did you do this thing?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied wearily. “It was the anzid, I think.” He saw her sudden frown and realized it wasn’t much of an explanation.

“I think the anzid did something to me—besides half killing me, that is. Since I was brought back, I’ve been able to see in the dark, and I’ve had this—this ability to avoid people’s sight. I’ve always been good at it, but now it’s—it’s uncanny. I used it the first time when we rescued Tisa, and I’ve been practicing since then. I used to—”

She held up her hand against his words. “No,” she said. “Let me think.”

She turned from him, pacing to the narrow window that looked out over the wet, red roofs of Mandrigyn. For a long moment she stood, her dark head bent, the gray light gleaming in the pewter streaks that frosted her hair. Outside, the plop and splash of a gondola’s pole could be heard in the canal, and the light tapping of hooves over the bridge nearby. Yirth’s cat, curled at the foot of Sun Wolf’s narrow cot, woke, stretched, and sprang soundlessly to the floor.

Then Yirth whispered, “Dear Mother.” She looked back at him. “Tell me about the night you spent in the pit,” she said.

He returned her gaze in silence, unwilling to share the extent of grief and pain and humiliation. Only one person knew the whole and, if she were even still alive, he did not know where she was now. At length he said, “Sheera had her victory over me. Isn’t that enough?”

“Don’t be a fool,” the witch said coldly. “There was no anzid left in your system when she led us back to you.”

He stared at her, not comprehending.

“Did you have visions?”

He nodded mutely, his body shaken with a fit of shivering at the memory of those dreams of power and despair.

She put her hands to her temples, the thick, streaky hair springing over and through her fingers, like water through a sieve of bone. “Dear Mother,” she murmured again.

Her voice sounded hollow, half stunned. “I found it among her things when she was killed,” she said, as if to herself. “Chilisirdin—my master. I didn’t think . . . in our business there are always poisons. We deal in them—poisons, philters, abortifacients. Sometimes a death is the only answer. I never thought anything else of it.”

“What are you talking about?” he whispered, though it was coming to him, in a kind of unveiling of horror, what she meant.

Her face, in the deepening shadows, seemed suddenly very young, its stony self-possession stripped away by fear and hope. “Tell me, Captain—why did you become a warrior and not a shaman among your people?”

Sun Wolf stared at her for as long as it would take to count to a hundred, stunned at the truth of her question, struck as he had been during the tortured visions in the pit, with the memory of his black and icy childhood and of all those things of beauty and power that he had set aside in the face of his father’s bleak mockery. In a voice very unlike his own, he stammered, “The old shaman died—long before I was born. The one we had was a charlatan, a fake. My father . . . ” He was silent, unable to go on.

For a time neither spoke.

Then he said, “No.” He made a movement, as if thrusting from him the thought that he could have what he had known from his earliest childhood was his birthright. “I’m no wizard.”

“What are you, then?” she demanded harshly. “If you hadn’t been born with the Power, the anzid would have killed you. I was surprised that it didn’t, but I thought it was because you were tough, were strong. It never crossed my mind otherwise, even though my master had told me that the Great Trial would kill any who were not mageborn to begin with.”

Cold and irrational terror rose in him. His mouth dry, he whispered, “I’m no wizard. I’m a warrior. My business is war. I stay out of that stuff. My life is war. Starhawk . . . ” He paused, uncertain what he had meant to say about Starhawk. “I can’t change at my age.”

“You are changed,” Yirth said bitterly. “Like it or not.”

“But I don’t know any magic!” he protested.

“Then you had best learn,” she rasped, an edge of impatience stinging into her voice. “For believe me, Altiokis will come to know that there is another proven wizard in the world, another who has passed through the Great Trial. Most of us undergo the training first, and the Trial when we have the strength to endure it. You had the strength—either from your training as a warrior or because the magic you were born with is strong, stronger than any I have heard tell of. But without training in the ways of it, you are helpless to fight the Wizard King,”

Sun Wolf lay back on the cot. The smart of his arms and shoulders and the raw places on his wrists where the spancel had been removed bitterly reinforced his memory of the Wizard King. “He’ll follow me wherever I go, won’t he?” he asked quietly.

“Probably,” Yirth answered. “As he hounded my master Chilisirdin to her death.”

The Wolf turned his eyes toward her in the dark. The daylight had faded from the attic, but among themselves, wizards had no need of light. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just given for free what you would have sold everything you owned to possess; and here I am complaining because I don’t want it. But I was raised to steer very clear of magic, and I—I’m afraid of the Power.”

“You should be,” she snapped. In a quieter voice, she went on. “It is unheard of for an untrained mage to pass through the Great Trial. You must leave Altiokis’ domains, and quickly; but if you take my advice, you must seek out another wizard as fast as you can. You do not know the extent of your powers; without the teaching and the discipline of wizardry, you are as dangerous as a mad dog.”

Sun Wolf chuckled softly in the darkness. “I know. I’ve seen it a thousand times in my own business. When a boy comes to me to be trained in arms, he’s the most dangerous between the fourth month and the twelfth. That’s when he’s learned the physical power, but not the spiritual control—and he hasn’t quite grasped the fact that there’s anyone alive who can beat him. That’s the age when someone—myself or Starhawk or Ari, has to trounce the daylights out of him, to keep him from picking fights with everyone else in the troop. If a boy survives the first year, he has the discipline and the brains to be a soldier.”

He heard her small, faint sniff, which he rightly interpreted as laughter. “And to think I once despised you for being a soldier,” she said. “I will teach you what I can while you are hidden here, until we can get you out of the city. But you must find a true wizard—one who has had the fullness of his power for many years and who understands in truth what I know only in theory.”

“I would do that in any case,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “I know that my days as a warrior are done.”

Clear and sharp, the vision returned to him of his own hands seared to the bone from grasping the molten fire of his dreams. It hurt to let the old life go, to release what he had striven for and taken pride in since he was a boy old enough to wield a child’s sword. It left him with a stricken feeling of emptiness, as if with the sword he had given up an arm as well. Ari would take the troop and the school at Wrynde. Starhawk . . . 

He looked up. “There’ll be a woman coming here,” he said, knowing that with the Hawk’s stubbornness, even his vision manifesting itself to her in a dream and telling her to give up the search would not be sufficient to turn her aside. Stubborn female!
he added to himself. “She’s looking for me. Tell her . . . ”

Tell her what? That he’d gone on, searching for a wizard in a world long bereft of such things? That she should follow him once again?

“Tell her to meet me in Wrynde, before the summer’s end. Tell her I swear that I will come to her there.” He paused, picturing her with sharp and painful clarity in the quiet of the stone garden below the school. He had not walked its paths in summer for nearly twenty years. “Tell her what became of me,” he added quietly.

The deformed mouth quirked suddenly into a wry smile, showing teeth white as snow in the gloom.
“A long way to travel,” she remarked. “Shall I teach you how to find this woman yourself?”

He saw what must have been his own expression reflected in the one of deepening amusement in her eyes and grinned ruefully. “If I’m going to go back to being a schoolboy at my age,” he said, “I’m certainly developing the reactions of one.”

“That, Captain, is only because you have never before this particularly cared where anyone else was, or if that person lived or died,” Yirth replied calmly. “The relationships of the body are the business of women like Amber Eyes—the relationships of the heart are mine. I have made as many love philters as I have made poisons and abortifacients. They all tell me why. They are driven to tell; I do not ask. There is nothing that I have not heard.

“And do you know, Captain, that I have heard men sneer at—what do they call? A respectable man of full age—suddenly discovering what it is to love another person. Doubtless you yourself know what they say.”

Sun Wolf had the grace to blush.

“But if a man who has been crippled from childhood is healed at the age of forty, will he not jump and dance and turn cartwheels like a young boy, scorning the dignity of his years? The mockers are those who themselves are still crippled. Think nothing of it.” She shook back the thick mane of hair from her shoulders, her face framed in it like the white blur of an asymmetrical skull in the gloom. “Will you sleep?”

He hesitated. “If you’re tired, yes,” he said. “If you’re willing, I’d rather spend the night learning whatever you have to teach me about my new trade.”

And Yirth laughed, a faint, dry, little sound that Sun Wolf reflected he was probably the first member of the male sex to have heard. “What I have to teach is meager enough,” she said. “I have the learning, but my powers are very small.”