Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (9 page)

“Stupid thing to do,” he cut her off and saw her eyes flash with rage. “There a place to live in this orangery of yours?”

In a voice stifled with anger, she said, “There is.”

“Good.” Tiredness was coming over him again, final and irresistible, as if argument and thought and struggle against what he knew would be his fate had drained him of the little strength he had. The wan sunlight, the faces of the women around him and their soft voices, seemed to be drifting farther and farther away, and he fought to hold them in focus. “You—what’s your name? Denga Rey—I’ll need you for my second-in-command. You fight during the winter?”

“In Mandrigyn?” she scoffed. “If it isn’t pouring sideways rain and hail, the ground’s not fit for anything but boat races. The last fights were three weeks ago.”

“I hope you were trounced to within an inch of your life,” he said dispassionately.

“Not a chance, soldier.” She put her hands on her strong hips, a glint of mockery in those dark eyes. “What I wonder is, who’s going to look after all those little trees so it looks as if there’s really a gardener doing the job? If Sheera buys one special, somebody’s going to get suspicious.”

Sun Wolf looked up at her bleakly. “I am,” he said. “I’m a warrior by trade, but gardening is my hobby.” His eyes returned to Sheera. “And I damned well better draw pay for it, too.”

For the first time, she smiled, the warm, bright smile of the hellcat girl she hadn’t been in years. He could see then why men had fought for her hand—as they must have done, to make her so poxy arrogant. “I’ll add it in,” she said, “to your ten thousand gold pieces.”

Sun Wolf sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if it would be wise to tell her what she could do with her ten thousand gold pieces. But when he opened them again, he found that it was dark, the afternoon long over, and the women gone.

They sailed into Mandrigyn harbor in the vanguard of the storms, as if the boat drew the rain in its wake.

Throughout the forenoon, Sun Wolf had stood in the waist of the ship, watching the clouds that had followed them like a black and seething wall through the gray mazes of the islands draw steadily closer, and wondering whether, if the ship went to pieces on the rocky headlands that guarded the harbor itself, he’d be able to swim clear before he was pulped by the breakers. For a time, he indulged in hopes that it would be so and that, other than himself, the ship would go down with all hands and Sheera and her wildcats would never be heard from again. This thought cheered him until he remembered that, if the sea didn’t kill him, the anzid would.

As they passed through the narrow channel between the turret-guarded horns of the harbor, he turned his eyes from the dark, solitary shape of Yirth, standing, as she had stood on and off for die past three days, on the stern castle of the ship; he looked across the choppy gray waters of the harbor to where Mandrigyn lay spread like a jeweled collar upon its thousand islands.

Mandrigyn was the queen city of the Megantic
Sea, the crossroads of trade; even in the bitter slate colors of the winter day, it glittered like a spilled jewel box, turquoise, gold, and crystal. Sun Wolf looked upon Mandrigyn and shivered.

Above the town rose the dark masses of the Tchard
Mountains, the huge shape of Grimscarp veiled in a livid rack of purplish clouds, as if the Wizard King sought to conceal his fortress from prying eyes. Closer to, he could identify the trashy gaggle of markets and bawdy theaters as East Shore—the suburb that Gilden Shorad had told him lay outside the city’s jurisdiction on the eastern bank of the Rack River. The colors of raw wood and cheap paint stood out like little chips of brightness against the rolling masses of empty, furze-brown hills that lay beyond; the Thanelands, where the ancient landholders still held their ancestral sway.

A gust of rain struck him, cold and stinging through the drab canvas of his shirt. As he hunched his shoulders against it like a wet animal, he felt the unfamiliar hardness of metal against his flesh, the traditional slave collar, a slip-chain like a steel noose that the ship’s aged handyman had affixed around his neck.

He glanced back over his shoulder, hatred in his eyes, but Yirth had vanished from the poop deck. Sailors, at least half of them women or young boys, were scrambling up and down the rigging, making the vessel ready to be guided into the quays.

There was little activity in the harbor, most shipping having ceased a week ago in anticipation of the storms. Of the sailors and stevedores whom Sun Wolf could see about the docks, most were older men, young boys, or women. The city, he thought, had been hard hit indeed. As the rain-laden gusts of wind drove the ship toward the wharves, he could hear a ragged cheer go up from the vast gaggle of unveiled and brightly clad women who loitered on the pillared promenade of the long seafront terrace that overlooked the harbor. Friends of Denga Rey’s, he guessed, noting the couple of nasty-looking female gladiators who swaggered in their midst.

Well, why not? Business is probably damned slow these days.

At some distance from that rowdy mob he picked out other welcoming committees. There was a tall girl and a taller woman whose ivory-blond hair, whipped by the wind from beneath their desperately clutched indigo veils, proclaimed them as kin of Gilden Shorad’s. With them was a lady as tiny, and as fashionably dressed, as Gilden—family, he thought, no error.

Farther back, among the pillars of the windswept promenade, a couple of liveried servants held an oiled-silk canopy over the head of a tiny woman in amethyst moire, veiled in trailing clouds of lilac silk and glittering with gold and diamonds. With that kind of ostentation, he thought, she has to be a friend of Sheera’s. No one, evidently, had come to meet Yirth.

A voice at his elbow said quietly, “We made it into harbor just in time.”

He turned to see Sheera beside him, covered, as befitted a lady, from crown to soles, her hands encased in gold-stitched kid, her hair a mass of curls and jewels that supported the long screens of her plum-colored veils. She held a fur-lined cloak of waterproof silk tightly around her; Sun Wolf, wearing only the shabby, secondhand shirt and breeches of a slave, studied her for a moment, fingering the chain around his neck, then glanced back at the vicious sea visible beyond the headlands. Even in the shelter of the harbor, the waters churned and threw vast columns of bone-white spray where they struck the stone piers; no ship could make it through the channel now. “If you ask me, we cut that a little too close for comfort,” he growled.

Sheera’s lips tightened under the blowing gauze. “No one asked you,” she replied thinly. “You have Yirth to thank that we’re alive at all. She’s been existing on drugs and stamina for the last three days to hold off the storms until we could make port.”

“I have Yirth to thank,” Sun Wolf said grimly, “that I’m on this pox-rotted vessel to begin with.”

There was a momentary silence, Sheera gazing up into his eyes with a dangerous tautness to her face. By the look of it, she hadn’t gotten much more sleep in the last several days than Yirth had. Sun Wolf returned her gaze calmly, almost mockingly, daring her to fly into one of her rages.

When she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. “Just remember,” she said, “that I could speak to Yirth and let you scream yourself to death.”

Equally softly, he replied, “Then you’d have to find someone else to train your ladies, wouldn’t you?”

Sheera’s next words were forestalled by the arrival of Gilden, veiled diaphanously and preceding a whole line of porters bearing enough luggage for a year in the wilds. She said quietly to Sheera, “Yirth’s in her cabin. She’ll wait until the crowds have thinned off a bit, then slip away unnoticed. The ship’s coming in this way ahead of the storm will have attracted enough notice as it is; we don’t want any of Derroug’s spies reporting to Altiokis that Yirth was on board.”

Sheera nodded. “All right,” she agreed, and Gilden moved off, slipping back effortlessly into the role of an indefatigably frivolous, middle-class globe-trotter amid the welter of her luggage.

They had come in among the quays now, the crew making the ship fast to the long stone wharf. The wet air crackled with orders, curses, and shouts. Farther up the rail, Denga Rey and Amber Eyes were leaning over to wave and call to their cronies on the dock. The fitful, blowing gusts of rain beaded the gladiator’s shaven scalp and the courtesan’s soft, apricot-colored mane of unveiled hair; both Gilden and Sheera, as was proper for women of their station and class, ignored them totally.

The gangplank was let down. A couple of sailors, a woman and a boy, brought up Sheera’s trunk. After a single burning, haughty stare from Sheera, Sun Wolf lifted it to his shoulder and carried it down the cleated ramp at her heels.

The wharves of Mandrigyn, as the Wolf had seen from the deck of the ship, were connected at their landward end by a columned promenade, undoubtedly a strolling place in the heat of the summer for the fashionable of the town. In the winter, with its elaborate topiary laid naked by the winds and its marble pillars and statues stained and darkened by flickering rain, it was drafty and depressing. At a score of intervals along its length, it was broken by brightly tiled footbridges that crossed the mouths of Mandrigyn’s famous canals; looking down through the nearest bridge’s half-hexagon archway, the Wolf could see a sort of sheltered lagoon there, where half a dozen gondolas rocked on their moorings. Beyond these rainbow-colored, minnow-like boats, the canal wound away into the watery city between the high walls of the houses, the waters shivering where they were brushed by squalls of rain. Everything seemed dark with wetness and clammy with moss. Against this background, the tiny lady who emerged from beneath her oiled-silk canopy to greet Sheera seemed incongruously gaudy.

“Sheera, I was terrified you wouldn’t make it into the harbor!” she cried in a high, rather light voice and extended tiny hands, gloved in diamond-speckled confections of white and lavender lace.

Sheera took her hands in greeting, and they exchanged a formal kiss of welcome amid a whirl of wind-torn silk veils. “To tell you the truth, I was afraid of that myself.” she admitted, with a smile that was the closest Sun Wolf had seen her get to warm friendliness in all their short acquaintance. Sheera was evidently fond of this woman—and, by her next remark, very much in her confidence.

“Did you find one?” the tiny lady asked, looking up into Sheera’s face with a curiously intent expression, as if for the moment, Sheera and Sheera alone existed for her. “Did you succeed?”

“Well,” Sheera said, and her glance flickered to Sun Wolf, standing stoically, the trunk balanced on his shoulder, a little way off. “There has been a change in plans.”

The woman frowned indignantly, as if at an affront. “What? How?” The wind caught in her lilac-colored veils, blowing them back to reveal a delicate-complected, fine-boned face, set off by beautiful brown eyes under long, perfectly straight lashes. For all that she was as overdressed as a saint in a Trinitarian cathedral, she was a well-made little thing. Sun Wolf judged, both dainty and full-breasted. No girl, but a woman of Sheera’s age.

Sheera introduced them quietly. “Drypettis Dru, sister to the governor of Mandrigyn. Captain Sun Wolf, chief of the mercenaries of Wrynde.”

Drypettis’ eyes, originally dark with indignation at being presented to a slave, widened with shock, then flickered quickly back to Sheera. “You brought their commander here?”

From the direction of the ship, the whole gaudy crowd of what looked like prostitutes and gladiators came boiling past them, laughing and joking among themselves. At the sight of Sun Wolf, they let fly a volley of appreciative whistles, groans, and commentary so outspoken that Drypettis Dru stiffened with shocked indignation, and blood came stinging up under the thin skin of her cheeks.

“Really, Sheera,” she whispered tightly, “if we must have people like that in the organization, can’t you speak to them about being a little more—more seemly in public?”

“We’re lucky to have them in our organization, Dru,” Sheera said soothingly. “They can go anywhere and know everything—and we will need them all the more now.”

The limpid brown eyes darted back to Sheera. “You mean you were asked for more money than you could offer?”

“No,” Sheera said quietly. “I can’t explain here. I’ve told Gilden to spread the word. There’s a meeting tonight at midnight in the old orangery in my gardens. I’ll explain to everyone then.”

“But . . . ”

Sheera lifted a finger to her for silence. From the direction of the nearest lagoon, a couple of elderly servants were approaching, bowing with profuse apologies to Sheera for being late. She made a formal curtsy to Drypettis and took her leave, walking toward the gondola moored at the foot of a flight of moss-slippery stone stairs without glancing back to see if Sun Wolf were following. After a moment, he did follow, but he felt Drypettis’ eyes on his back all the way.

While one servitor was making Sheera comfortable under a canopy in the waist of the gondola, Sun Wolf handed the trunk down the narrow steps to the other one. Before descending, he looked back along the quay, deserted now, with the masts of the ships tossing restlessly against the scudding rack of the sky. He saw the woman Yirth, like a shadow, come walking slowly down the gangplank and pause at its bottom, leaning upon the bronze bollard there as if she were close to stumbling with exhaustion. Then, after a moment, she straightened up, pulled her plain frieze cloak more tightly about her, and walked away into the darkening city alone.

From his loft above the orangery.
Sun Wolf could hear the women arriving. He heard the first one come in silence, her footfalls a faint, tapping echo in the wooden spaces of the huge room. He heard the soft whisper of talk when the second one joined her. From the loft’s high window, he could see their catlike shapes slip through the postern gate at the bottom of the garden that gave onto the Learn
Canal and glide silently from the stables, where, Sheera had told him, there was an old smugglers’ tunnel to the cellar of a building on the Learn Lagoon. He watched them scuttle through the shadows of the wet, weedy garden, past the silhouetted lacework of the bathhouse pavilion, and with unpracticed stealth, into the orangery itself.