Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (41 page)

The women around them were silent, not knowing what to say or how to speak of that betrayal.

It was Starhawk who broke the silence, her natural habit of command laying the course for all the others to follow. Sheera’s grief was her own; Starhawk understood, and was the first of them not to speak of it. She laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder and asked in her most businesslike voice, “How soon can your ladies be ready to march?”

If what Lady Wrinshardin had said was true—and Sun Wolf could think of no reason for her to have lied—the fortress of the Thanes of Grimscarp had once stood at the base of that rocky and forbidding knee of stone which thrust out of the mountain above the Iron Pass. The siegecraft that had been bred into his bones picked out the place, even as the Dark Eagle and his men took him past it—a weed-grown rubble of stones, just past where the road divided. There was no signpost at the fork, but Amber Eyes and her girls had told him that the right-hand way went up to the southward entrances of the mines below the Citadel, then wound around the base of the mountain to the main, western entrances above Altiokis’ administrative center at Racken Scrag; the left-hand way twisted up the rock face, toward the Citadel itself.

Weary from two days with little sleep and from half a day’s hard ride up the rocky Iron Pass, his wrists chafed and raw from the weight of some thirty pounds of iron chain, Sun Wolf looked up through the murk of low-lying cloud at the Citadel, where the Wizard King awaited him, and wondered why anyone in his right mind would have made the place the center of his realm.

There was the legend Lady Wrinshardin had quoted about the stone hut that Altiokis had raised in a single night—the stone hut that was supposed to be still standing, the buried nucleus of the Citadel’s inner core. But why Altiokis had chosen to do so made no sense to the Wolf, unless, as he had begun to suspect, the Wizard King were mad. Perhaps he had built the Citadel in such an impossible, inaccessible place simply to show that he could. Perhaps he had put it here so that no city could grow up around his walls; Racken Scrag perforce lay on the other side of the mountain.

The Gods knew, the place was defensible enough. The impossible road was overlooked at every turning by overhanging cliffs; if Yirth were right about Altiokis’ powers of far-seeing, he would be able to detect any force coming up that road, long before it got within sight of the Citadel, and bury it under avalanches of stone or landslides of burning wood. But when they reached the narrow, rocky valley before the Citadel’s main gate, Sun Wolf understood why it was cheaper and simpler to haul the food for the legions up through the mines, for here Altiokis’ fears had excelled themselves.

Most of the works in the valley were new. Sun Wolf judged; with the expansion of his empire, the Wizard King had evidently grown more and more uneasy. The Citadel of Grimscarp had originally been built between the cliff edge that looked northward over the wastes of the Tchard Mountains and a great spur or rock that cut it off from the rest of the Scarp on which it stood; its main entrance had tunneled straight through this unscalable knee of rock. Now the floor of the valley below the gate had been cut with giant pits, like a series of dry moats; slave gangs were still at work carving out the nearer ones as the Dark Eagle and his party emerged from between the dark watchtowers that overhung the little pass into the vale. While they paused to breathe the horses after the climb, Sun Wolf could see that the rock and earth within these long moats were charred. If an enemy managed to bridge them—if any enemy could get bridges up that winding road—the ditches could be floored with some flammable substance and ignited at a distance by the magic of the Wizard King.

They were bridged now by drawbridges of wood and stone, things that could easily be torn down or destroyed. The bridges did not lie in a direct line with the gate, which was cut directly into the cliff face at the other side, without turrets or outworks. The Wolf knew instinctively that it was the kind of gate that could be concealed with illusion; if Altiokis willed it, travelers to that Citadel would see nothing but the stark and treeless gray rock of the Scarp as they reached the head of the road.

He was coming to understand how a man such as the Wizard King had built his empire, between unlimited wealth and animal cunning, between hired strength and the dark webs of his power.

The men who held the reins of Sun Wolf’s horse led him on, down the slope toward the bridges and the iron-toothed, forbidding gate. The hooves of the horses echoed weirdly in the smooth stone of the tunnel walls. Guards in black armor held up smoky torches to look at them. The Dark Eagle repeated passwords with a faint air of impatience and led them onward. The tunnel itself reeked with evil; its stone walls seemed to drip horror. The air there was fraught with latent magic that could be turned into illusions of unspeakable fear. Great gates led into wide, downward-sloping ways, the lines of torches along the walls fading into blackness at the end. The warm breath that rose from these tunnels stank of muddy rock, of illusion, and of the glittering, nameless magic of utter dread. It was as if Altiokis’ power had been spread throughout his Citadel, as if his mind permeated the tunnels, the darkness, and the stone.

Sun Wolf whispered, almost unaware that he spoke aloud, “How can he spread himself so thin?”

The Dark Eagle’s head snapped around. “What?”

There were no words to express it to someone not mageborn; it was a concept impossible to describe. The closest the Wolf could come to it was to say, “His spirit is everywhere here.”

White teeth flashed in the gloom. “Ah. You’ve felt that, have you?”

The Wolf could see that the mercenary captain thought that he spoke in admiration, or in awe. He shook his head impatiently. “It’s everywhere, but it isn’t in himself. He’s put part of his power in the rocks, in the air, in the illusions at the bottom of the mine shafts—but he has to keep it all up. He has to hold it together somehow, and—how can there be anything left back at the center of him, the key of his being, to hold it with?”

The Dark Eagle’s smile faded; that round, swarthy countenance grew thoughtful; in the darkness, the blue eyes seemed very bright. “Gilgath, Altiokis’ Commander of the Citadel, has said that my lord has been slipping—he’s been with Altiokis far longer than I.” His voice was low, excluding even the men who rode about them. “I never believed it until about two years ago—and what you say makes sense.” He shrugged, and that wary look left his face. “But even so, my barbarian,” he continued, as slaves came to take their horses, and they passed through the courtyards of the heavily defended Outer Citadel, “he has power enough to crush his enemies to dust—and money enough to pay his friends.”

Other guards surrounded them, men and a few women in the bright panoplies of the mercenary troops. They were escorted through the courts and gateways of the Outer Citadel, up to the massive gatehouse that loomed against the sky, guarding the way into the Inner Citadel. The Dark Eagle strode now at Sun Wolf’s side, the chain mail of his shirt jingling, the gilded spike that protruded through the dark, fluttering veils of his helmet crests flashing in the wan daylight.

“Wait until you come into the Inner Citadel, if you think his power has thinned.”

They entered the darkness of the gatehouse, two men holding the chain that joined Sun Wolf’s wrists, the rest of the troop walking with drawn swords behind him. All the while the Wolf was concentrating, his mind calm and alert as in battle, waiting for his chance to escape and reviewing the way down the mountain.

Daylight blazed ahead. Like a huge mouth, a gate opened around them. As they stepped from the dense shadows, Sun Wolf saw that it led onto a kind of causeway that spanned the long, stone-walled ditch separating the Outer Citadel from the Inner. At the center, the causeway was broken by a railless drawbridge. The pit itself crawled with nuuwa.

In spite of the day’s cold, the carrion stink of them rose in a suffocating wave. Halfway across the drawbridge itself, the Wolf stopped. Turning, he saw that the Dark Eagle had his hand on his sword hilt. “Don’t try it,” the mercenary said quietly. “Believe me, if I went over, I guarantee that you’d go, too.”

“Would it make that much difference?”

The Dark Eagle cocked a sardonic eyebrow. “That depends on what you think your chances of escaping from the Inner Citadel are.”

Below them, the nuuwa had begun to gather, their grunting undulations shattering the air. Sun Wolf glanced at the men holding his chain, then back at the Eagle. He could see that the sheer wall of the Inner Citadel was broken by two gates, one fairly close and one several hundred feet away, with steps leading down into the pit of the nuuwa, plus the heavily guarded gate on their own level that let onto the causeway. There were gates into the pit from the Outer Citadel as well. It was a good bet that those were all heavily barred.

It was a gamble—to die horribly now, or to risk an uglier fate against an almost nonexistent chance of escape.

Compared with this, he thought bitterly as he moved off again toward the looming maw of the Inner Citadel’s gates, the choice Sheera had given him on the ship appeared monumental in its opportunities. But he would not give up when the chance remained to play for time.

The nuuwa’s screams followed them, like derisive jeers.

“You’ll be down there soon enough,” the Dark Eagle remarked at his elbow. “It’s a pity, for no one knows as well as I how fine a soldier you are, my barbarian. But I know that’s what my lord Wizard does with those who go against him. And after that thing gets through gnawing your brains out, you won’t much care about the accommodations.”

Sun Wolf glanced back at him. “What is it?” he asked, “What are those—those flame-things? Does he create them?”

The mercenary captain frowned, as if gauging the reasons for the question and how much he would give away in his answer. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s a—a darkness in the room at the bottom of the Citadel, a cold. They come out of that darkness; usually one or two, but sometimes in flocks. Other times there’ll be days, weeks, with nothing. He himself won’t go into the room—I think he fears them as much as anyone else does. He can’t command them as he does the nuuwa.”

“Can he command the darkness they come from?”

The Dark Eagle paused in his stride, those swooping black brows drawing together beneath the crested helmet rim. But all he said was, “You have changed, my barbarian, since we rode together in the East.”

The black doors of the Inner Citadel opened. Its shadows swallowed them.

The dread of the place, the eerie terror that permeated the very air, struck Sun Wolf like a blow in the face as he crossed the threshold. Like a dog that would not pass the door of a haunted room, he stopped, his breath catching in his lungs; the men dragged him through by the chain on his wrists, but he could see that their faces, too, were wet with sweat. Fear filled the shadowy maze of tunnels and guardrooms on the lower level of the Citadel, as if a species of gas had been spread upon the air; the men who surrounded him with a hedge of drawn swords looked nervously about them, as if they were not certain in which direction the danger lay. Even the Dark Eagle’s eyes darted from shadow to shadow, the only restlessness in his still face.

But more than the fear, Sun Wolf could feel the power there, cold and almost visible, like an iridescent fog. It seemed to cling to the very walls, as it had pervaded the tunnel of the gate—a strength greater than that of Altiokis, all-pervasive and yet tangible. He felt that, if he only knew how, he could have gathered it together in his hands.

They ascended a stair and passed through a guarded door. It shut behind them, and Sun Wolf looked around him in sudden, utter amazement at the upper levels of the tower, the inner heart of the Citadel of Altiokis, the dwelling place of the greatest wizard on the face of the earth.

Quite factually, Sun Wolf said, “I’ve seen better taste in whorehouses.”

The Dark Eagle laughed, his teeth and eyes bright in his swarthy face. “But not more expensive materials, I daresay,” he commented and flicked with a fingernail the gold that sheathed the inner side of the great doors. “A house, as my lord Wizard is fond of saying, fit for a man to live in.”

Sun Wolf’s eyes traveled slowly from the jeweled garlands that embroidered the ivory panels of the ceiling, down slender columns of pink porphyry and polished green malachite twined with golden serpents, to the tastelessly pornographic statues in ebony, alabaster, and agate that stood between them. Gilding was spread like butter over everything; the air was larded with the scent of patchouli and roses.

“A man, maybe,” he said slowly, realizing it was only a gross exaggeration of the kind of opulence he would have gone in for himself, not too many months ago. Then he understood what had shocked him in his soul about the place and about all the fortress of the Wizard King. “But not the greatest of the wizards; not the only wizard left on the face of the earth, damn it.” He looked back at the Dark Eagle, wondering why the man did not understand. “This is obscene.”

The captain chuckled. “Oh, come now, Wolf.” He gestured at the shamelessly posturing statues. “You’re getting squeamish in your old age. You’ve seen worse than this in the cathouses in Kwest Mralwe—the most expensive ones, that is.”

“I don’t mean that,” the Wolf said. He looked around him again, at the glided archways, the embroidered hangings, and the bronze lamp stands on which burned not flames, but round, glowing bubbles of pure light. In his mind, he was comparing the garish waste with Yirth’s shadowy workroom, with its worn and well-cared-for books, its delicate instruments of brass and crystal, and its dry, muted scent of medicinal herbs. “He is deathless, he is powerful; he has command over magic that I would trade my soul for. He can have anything he wants. And he chooses this trash.”

The Dark Eagle cocked an amused eyebrow up at the Wolf and signaled his men. They jerked on the chain and rattled their swords, leading Sun Wolf on through the wide, softly lighted halls of the upper levels, their feet scuffing over silken rugs or whispering over carved jade tiles. “I remember you almost cut my throat fighting over trash very much like this when we looted the palace at Thardin,” he reminded the Wolf with a grin.