Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (45 page)

“I cannot set fire to anything at a distance,” she said. “I must see it to bring fire.”

The others stared at her, shocked at the limitation; the Wolf was puzzled. “You can’t—can’t bring fire to a place that you know in your mind?” he asked. “Can’t form it in your mind?” The act of bringing fire seemed so easy to him, though he had never done it—like turning away the minds of those who sought him, or changing the way he saw things, to pierce another wizard’s illusions.

She shook her head, clearly not understanding what he meant. “You can, perhaps,” she said. “But it lies beyond my power.”

So it was Sun Wolf, after all, who had to lead the small crew through the winding mazes, toward the Hole once again. Yirth followed them, though he had warned her against entering the observation room of the Hole itself; two or three of the freed miners helped carry the sacks of blasting powder. To Sun Wolf’s ears, the fighting was far off in the upper part of the tower and, by the sound of it, it was turning into the grim, messy business of mopping up, fighting in pockets here and there—the bloody scrag ends of battle.

Closer and more real in his own mind was the buzzing darkness that ate at the corners of his consciousness, demanding, insistent as a scarcely bearable tickling. He rested his hand on Starhawk’s shoulder for support and saw, almost disinterestedly, that his fingers were trembling. He was conscious in a half-detached way of the sun sliding down the outside walls of the Citadel, changing colors as it approached the ragged horizon; though, when he mentioned to Yirth this awareness of things he could not actually see, she shook her head and looked at him strangely with her jade-colored eyes. The Entity whispering in his mind was more real to him than his own body, more real than the stone halls through which he stumbled like a mechanical thing—more real than anything except the sharp bones of the shoulder beneath his hand and the cold, pale silk of hair that brushed the backs of his fingers when Starhawk turned her head.

Through the little window of the observation room, they could see that Altiokis was still moving. Rolling, flopping grotesquely, he would occasionally stagger to his feet or mouth at the window glass. The jewels of his clothing had caught on the rough walls and ripped as he’d moved, and fat, white flesh bulged through the rents. One eye was gone, the other already being eaten away from within; his face was starting to change, as the faces of nuuwas did. Sheera made a gagging noise in her throat and looked away.

Sun Wolf scarcely saw. He remained by the door while the sacks of powder were stacked in the room and in the hall beyond, where Yirth waited. There was enough powder to blow out the whole western wall of the Citadel. His gaze went past the window, past the darkness, to deeper darkness, where he could see the Thing moving.

The giggling, scratching sensation in his brain was almost unendurable. It knew him. Threads of it permeated every fiber of his consciousness; he had a momentary, disturbed vision of himself, visible in the shadows through the thick, black glass of the window, his half-naked body clawed and filthy, his wrists still weighted with the iron bracelets, the blood from the ripped flesh of them slowly dripping down his fingers; his left eye was a charred and gory pit in a face white with shock and strain. The other people in this vision were mere puppets, grotesque, jerking, and unreal as they stumbled about their meaningless tasks. The Entity—whatever it was—could no more see them than they could see it. They were only half-guessed shapes, more like monkeys than human beings.

He watched as one of the shapes shambled up to him and reached a fiddling, picking hand out to touch him.

He closed his eyes, and the vision dissolved. When he opened them, Starhawk was looking worriedly into his face. “Chief?”

He nodded. “I’m all right.” His voice sounded like the faint rasp of a fingernail scraping metal. He looked around him, fixing the room in his mind—the stone walls, the shadows, the grayish-white cotton of the sacks that he knew the flames would lick over when he called them, and the carved ebony chair, shoved unceremoniously into a corner.

Starhawk and Denga Rey supported him between them as they led him from the room.

“You sure this is going to work?” Sheera asked nervously.

“No,” the Wolf said.

“Could Yirth . . . ”

“No,” Starhawk said. “We have enough problems without its getting its claws into another wizard.”

They turned a corner and followed a narrow passage toward the gate. With the smoothness of a door closing before them, the way was suddenly filled with armed men in black mail. The Dark Eagle stood at their head.

“I thought,” he said, smiling, “that we would still find you wandering around here. And Starhawk, too . . . You did bring your men, after all.” The Eagle’s swarthy face was grimed with blood and dirt in the torchlight, the swirling, petal-edged crests of his helmet torn and hacked with battle, their dark blue edges black in places and dripping; but through it all, his grin was no less bright.

“Let us out of here,” Sun Wolf said in a voice that shook. This is no time for fighting.”

“No?” One black brow lifted. “The nuuwa seem all to have gone crazy, but we should be able to drive them off the walls without much trouble. Altiokis should be pleased to hear—”

“Altiokis is dead,” the Wolf whispered, fighting to keep his thoughts clear and to keep the words that he spoke his own and not those that crowded, unbidden and unknown, to his throat. His harsh voice had turned slow and stammering, picking at his words. “His power is broken for good—there’s no need to fight—just let us out . . . ”

The mercenary captain smiled slowly; one of his men laughed. Sheera made a move to draw her sword, and Starhawk caught her wrist, knowing it would do no good.

“Quite a convincing tale,” the Dark Eagle said. “But considering that I have here my lord Tarrin’s lady—no uncommon general, I might add, my lady—not to mention the witch who led the miners through the traps and into the Citadel—if my lord is dead, which I have yet to believe, the power he wielded will be up for the taking. We can—”

“If you can touch the power he had, it will snuff your brains out like a candle flame,” the Wolf said harshly. “Go down the corridor and through the door. Look through that pox-rotten glass of his—look at what you see. Then come back, and we’ll talk about power!” His voice was trembling with strain and rage, his brain blinded with the effort of holding itself together against those tearing, muttering, black roots that were thrusting it apart. “Now let us the hell out of here, unless you want that Thing in there to take root in my brain as it did in his!”

The Dark Eagle stood for a moment, staring up into Sun Wolf’s face, into the hagridden, half-mad, yellow eye that stared from the mass of clotted cuts, stubble, and filth. The captain’s own face, under the soot and grime of battle, was smooth, an unreadable blank. Then without a word, he signed to his men to let Sun Wolf and the women pass. The Dark Eagle turned and walked down the corridor toward Altiokis’ observation room.

Sun Wolf had no recollection of passing the gate of the Inner Citadel or crossing the causeway over the fosse that was littered with the bodies of the slain. The men the Dark Eagle had sent to guard them halted at the far end of the causeway, and the Wolf slumped down in the shadows of the turreted gates, with his back against the raw, powder-burned stone. Looking back, he could see the lowers of the Inner Citadel alive with men and nuuwa, fighting in the corridors or looting the gilded halls. The shrieking came to him in a vast, chaotic din, and the shivering air was rank with the smoke of burning. The sinking sunlight gilded huge, billowing clouds of smoke that poured, black or white, from the tower windows. Heat danced above the walls, and now and then a man or a nuuwa would come running in flames from some inner hall, to fall screaming over the parapet, gleaming against the sunset like a brand. In the direction of the distant sea, torn rags of cloud covered the sky. It would be a night of storm.

Wind touched his face, the breath of the mountains, polluted by the stinks of battle. Everything seemed remote to him, like something viewed through a heavy layer of black glass. He wondered idly if that had been how things appeared to Altiokis—unreal, a little meaningless. No wonder he had sought the grossest and most immediate sensations; they were all he could feel. Or had his perceptions changed after he had given up?

Darkness seemed to be closing in on Sun Wolf. He reached out blindly, not wholly certain what it was that he sought, and a long, bony hand gripped his. The pressure of Starhawk’s strong fingers helped clear his mind. His remaining eye met hers; her face appeared calm under the mask of filth and cuts; the sunset light was like brimstone on her colorless hair. Against the grime, her eyes appeared colorless, too, clear as water.

Beyond her, around them, the women stood like a bodyguard, their own blood and that of their enemies vivid on their limbs against the rock dust of the mines. He was aware of Yirth watching him, arms folded, those sea-colored eyes intent upon his face; he wondered if, when his mind gave up and was drowned in blackness, she would kill him.

He hoped so. His hand tightened over Starhawk’s.

There was a brief struggle on the far end of the causeway. A sword flashed in the sinking light; one of the soldiers at that, in the armor of Altiokis’ private troops, went staggering over the edge into the ditch.

The Dark Eagle came striding back, sheathing his sword as be picked his way carefully across the makeshift of rope and pole that had been thrown up to replace the burned drawbridge. Under the tattered wrack of his torn helmet crests, his face was green-white and gray about the mouth, as if he had just got done heaving up his farthest guts. The dying sunlight caught on the gilded helmet spike as on a spear.

When he came near, he asked, “How do you mean to destroy it?”

“Light the powder,” Sheera said. “Tarrin and the men are clear of the place now.”

“There are nuuwa all over the corridors,” the Eagle informed her, speaking as he might speak to any other captain. And so she looked, Sun Wolf thought, with her half-unraveled braids and black leather breast guards, her perilous beauty all splattered with blood. “By God and God’s Mother, I’ve never seen such a hell! You’ll never get back to put a fuse to it. And even if you did . . . ”

“The Wolf can light it,” Starhawk said quietly. “From here.”

The Dark Eagle looked down curiously at the slumped figure propped among the women against the wall. His blue eyes narrowed. “His Nibs was right, then,” he said.

Sun Wolf nodded—Fire and cold were consuming his flesh; voices echoed to him, piping and far away. The shadow of the tower already lay long over the fosse and touched him like a finger of the coming darkness.

Fumblingly, as if in a drugged nightmare, he began to put together the picture of the observation room in his mind.

He could not see it clearly—there were nuuwa there, shambling over everything, blundering into walls, shrieking at their mindless brother and maker, who clawed and screamed through the black glass. He formed the shadows in his mind, the shapes of the powder sacks, the harsh lines of the broken chair . . . 

The images blurred.

Suddenly sharp, he saw them from the other side of the window.

He pushed the image away with an almost physical violence. It intruded itself into his mind again, like a weapon pushed into his hands. But he knew if he grasped that weapon, he would never be able to light the flame.

Both images died. He found himself huddled, shaking and dripping with sweat, in the blue shadow of the tower, the cold wind licking at his chilled flesh. He whispered, “I can’t.”

Starhawk was holding his hands. Trembling as if with fever, he raised his head and looked at the setting sun, which seemed to lie straight over the mountain horizon now, glaring at him like a baleful eye. He tried to piece together the image of the room and had it unravel in his hands into darkness. He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“All right,” the Hawk said quietly. “There’s time for me to go in with a fuse.”

It would have to be a short fuse, he thought . . . There were nuuwa everywhere . . . If she didn’t get out by the time it went off . . . 

There would be no time for her to get out before the sun set. And it was quite possible that she knew it.

“No,” he whispered as she turned to go. He heard her steps pause. “No,” he said in a stronger voice. He closed his eyes, calling nothing yet, losing himself in a chill, sounding darkness. He heard her come back, but she did not touch him, would not distract him.

Small, single, and precise he called it, not in pieces but all at once—room, shadows, chair, powder, window, nuuwa, darkness. He summoned the reality in his mind, distant and glittering as an image seen in fire, and touched the gray cotton of the sacks with a licking breath of fire. The nuuwa, startled by the sudden heat, drew back.

The thunderous roar of the explosion jerked the ground beneath him. The noise of it slammed into his skull. Through his closed eyes, he could see stones leaping outward, sunlight smashing into the centuries of darkness . . . light ripping where that darkness had taken hold of His Brain.

He Remembered Screaming, But nothing after that.

“There isn’t that much more to tell.” Starhawk crossed her long legs and tucked her bare feet up under the tumble of sheets and flowered silk quilts at the end of the bed. Against the dark embroidery of her shirt and the gaily inlaid bedpost at her back, she looked bleached, clean as crystal, remote as the winter sky, with her long, bony hands folded around her knees. “Amber Eyes had a picked squad of the prettiest girls—Gilden and Wilarne were two of them—and they tarted themselves up and went in first, to slit the throats of the gate guards before they knew what was happening. The alarm was out after that, but it was too late to keep the troop out of the mines; once we’d made it to the first of the armories and Tarrin got his men rallied, it was easy.”

Sun Wolf nodded. From long professional association, he understood what Starhawk meant by easy. The women all bore wounds of hard fighting. Twelve of the fifty had died in the darkness of the mines, never knowing whether their cause would succeed or not. But the fight had been straightforward, with a clear goal. He doubted whether either Starhawk or Sheera had ever questioned their eventual victory.