The Ladies of Mandrigyn

14

Had Sun Wolf been able to, he would have avoided Yirth’s care, but he could not. For two days he lay utterly helpless, drinking what little she gave him to drink, feeling the shadows shrink and rise with the passage of the cloudy days, and listening to the rain drum on the tiles or trickle, gossiping, from the eaves. In the nights, he heard the women assemble below, the thud of feet and the sharp bark of Denga Rey’s voice, Sheera’s curt commands, and mingling of voices in the gardens, as they came and went from the bathhouse. Once he heard a hesitant tread climb the stairs toward his loft, pause just below the turn that led to his door, and wait there for a long time, before retreating once again.

He slept a great deal. His body and mind both felt gutted. Sometimes the women who came—Amber Eyes, Yirth, occasionally Sheera—would speak to him, but he did not remember replying. There seemed to be no point in it.

On the third day, he was able to eat again, a little, though meat still nauseated him. In the afternoon, he went down to the potting room and repaired the damage mat neglect had done to his bulbs and to the young trees in the succession houses. Like a spark slowly flickering to life against damp tinder, he could feel himself coming back to himself, but the weariness that clung to his bones made him wary of even the slightest tax on either his body or the more deeply lacerated ribbons of his soul. When he heard Sheera come into the orangery in the changeable twilight at sundown, he avoided her, fading back into the shadows of the potting room when she entered it and slipping unseen out the door behind her.

After the women had come and gone that night, he went to tie in the hot water and steam of the bathhouse, listening to the wind that thrashed the bare branches overhead, feeling, as he had felt as a child, that curious sense of being alive with the life of the night around him.

He returned to a sleep unmarred by dreams.

Voices in the orangery woke him, a soft, furtive murmuring, and the swift patter of bare feet. During his illness, though she had nursed him by day, Amber Eyes had not spent the night there. He wondered whether she had had another lover all along while Sheera had assigned her to keep him occupied. The room was empty as he rolled soundlessly to his feet and stole toward the stairway door.

He could hear their voices clearly.

“... silly cuckoos, you should never have tried it alone! If you’d been taken ...”

It was Sheera’s voice, the stammering tension giving the lie to the anger in her words.

“More of us wouldn’t have done any good,” Gilden’s huskier tones argued. “It would have just made more to be caught... Holy God, Sheera, you weren’t there! I don’t know what it was! But...”

“Is she still there, then?” Denga Rey demanded sharply.

Gilden must have nodded. After a moment, the gladiator went on roughly. “Then we’ll have to go back.”

“But they’ll know someone’s trying to rescue her now.” That was Wilarne’s voice.

By the spirits of my ancestors, how the hell many of them are in on it, whatever it is! Sun Wolf asked himself.

Exercising every ounce of animal caution he possessed, trusting that whatever noise they were making down in the orangery would divert their minds, if the stairs creaked—though it shouldn’t, if their training had done them any good!—he slipped down the stairs, stopping just behind where he knew his body would catch the light.

There were five of them, grouped around the seed of light that glowed above the clay lamp on the table. A thread of gold reflection outlined the sharp curve of Denga Rey’s aquiline profile and glistened in her dark eyes. Beside her, Sheera was wrapped in the cherry-red wool of her bed robe, her black hair strewed over her shoulders like sea wrack. The three women before them were dressed—or undressed—for battle.

From his hiding place, Sun Wolf noted the changes in those delicate-boned bodies. The slack flesh had given place to hard muscle. Even Eo, towering above the two little hairdressers, had a taut sleekness to her, for all her remaining bulk. Under dark cloaks, they wore only the leather breast guards of their training outfits, short drawers, and knife belts. Their hair had been braided tightly back; Wilarne’s had come half undone in some kind of struggle and lay in an asymmetrical rope over her left shoulder, the ends tipped and sticky with blood.

Sheera’s women, he thought, had gone to battle before their commander was ready for it. He wondered why.

Sheera was saying, “When was she arrested? And why?”

Eo fixed her with cold, bitter blue eyes. “Do you really need to ask why?”

Sheera’s back stiffened. Gilden said, with her usual diplomacy, “The reason was supposedly insolence in the street. But he spoke to her yesterday outside Eo’s forge ...”

Eo went on bitterly. “Well, he can hardly seriously suspect a fifteen-year-old girl of treason.”

“We had to act fast,” Wilarne said, dark almond eyes wide with concern. “That’s why we weren’t in class tonight.”

“You’d have done better to come and get help,” Denga Rey snapped.

In the darkness of the stairs, Sun Wolf felt sudden anger kindle through him, startling and cold. Tisa, he thought. Gilden’s daughter, Eo’s niece and apprentice. A girl whose adolescent gawkishness was fading into a coltish beauty. He wondered if she, too, had been given an opportunity to prove her “loyalty” to Derroug and had been arrested for rebuffing him.

Gilden was saying, “We went in over the wall near the Lupris Canal. We took out two guards, weighted the bodies, and dumped them. But—Sheera, the guards in the palace compound itself! I swear they see in the dark. There was no light, none, but they saw us and came after us. We could hear them. One of them caught Wilarne...”

“I don’t understand it,” Wilarne whispered. Her hands, fine-boned and as little as a child’s, clenched together in the memory of the fight and the fear. “He—he didn’t seem to feel pain. Others were coming—I hurt him, I know I hurt him, but it didn’t stop him, it didn’t do anything. I barely got away...”

“All right,” Sheera said. “I’ll send a message to Drypettis, tell her what’s happened, and see if she can get us into the palace.”

“She’ll be watched,” Sun Wolf said. “And you couldn’t get a message to her tonight.”

It was the first time that he had spoken in three days, and they swung around, startled, not even knowing that he had been there watching them. Having spoken to Starhawk from the pit, he was no longer surprised at what remained of his voice, but he saw the frown that folded Sheera’s brow at the rasping wheeze of it, the worry in Eo’s broad, motherly face, and the flood of joy and relief in the eyes of Gilden and Wilarne. They had, he realized, been truly frightened for him.

Sheera was the first to speak. “Derroug doesn’t suspect Dru...”

“Maybe not of treason, but he knows she’d do just about anything you bade her. Whether he understands that there’s some kind of connection between you and Gilden, I don’t know... But in any case, we’ve got to get Tisa out of there before he tries to lay hands on her.”

He intercepted a look from Gilden and realized that, for all her briskly matter-of-fact attitude about her daughter, she was not quite the offhand mother she seemed. He also realized that she had not expected him to agree with her. Gruffly, he amplified. “If Derroug tries to force her, she’ll fight—and she’ll fight like a trained warrior, not a scared girl. Then the cat’s really going to be out of the bag. So when did you take out the guards, Gilden?”

Gilden stammered, recovering herself, “About two hours ago,” she said. “They were starting their watch—the watches are four hours.”

“We’ll need a diversion, then.” He glanced across at Sheera. “Think you can find Derroug’s sleeping quarters again?”

Her face scarlet, she said, “Yes,” in a stifled voice.

“Change your clothes, then, and bring your weapons. Denga, you stay here. I’m not surprised the little bastard’s guards saw you skirts in the dark if you didn’t blacken your flesh.”

Gilden, Wilarne, and Eo looked at one another in confusion.

“But never mind, you’re lucky you weren’t killed, and we’ll leave it at that. I don’t know if you’ve made any provision for the plot being blown, Sheera, but it’s too late to make one now. You know that if anyone’s captured, she’ll talk. You were in that cellar, too.”

At the memory of the red-haired young slave’s screams, Sheera went pale, her face drained of color as quickly as it had suffused.

“Myself, I’d sit tight and try to bluff it out. But if we’re not back by morning, Denga, you can assume that you’re in command and Derroug knows everything. Take whatever steps you think you need to.”

“All right,” the gladiator said.

“We’ll get Tisa to Lady Wrinshardin’s. Derroug know she’s your daughter?” This last was addressed to Gilden, who shook her head.

“Good.” He stood for a moment, studying his two half-pints, dainty little assassins with blood in their hair. “One more thing. As I said, we’ll need a diversion. You two are so good at coming up with pranks—by the time I come back, I want you to think of a real good one.”

And the interesting thing was that, when he came downstairs five minutes later, wearing only a short battle kilt, boots, and his weapons, they had thought of one.

“There they go.” Turning his face slightly to keep his nose out of the muddy roof tiles, Sun Wolf glanced down into the barracks courtyard of the governor’s palace, then across at Sheera, who lay spread-eagled in the shadows of the ornamental parapet at his side. She raised her head a little; the view from the roof of the counting house that backed the barracks court was excellent. Men could be seen pouring out of the barracks, sleepily pulling on their blue and gold livery or rubbing unshaven faces and cursing. In their midst, solicitously supported by the fat captain, minced the veiled forms of Gilden and Wilarne, dressed to the eyebrows in a fashion that would have done Cobra and Crazyred proud.

He heard the faint breath of Sheera’s laughter. “Where on earth did Gilden get that feather tippet?” she whispered. “That’s the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen, but it must have cost somebody fifty crowns!”

Strident and foul, Gilden’s voice carried up to them in a startlingly accurate rendering of a by-no-means carefully bred courtesan’s tones. “The bastard said something about burning the records—that all his Highness’ troops wouldn’t do him a speck of good without records.”

Sheera whispered, “The Records Office is in the northeast comer of the palace. Derroug’s quarters are at the southwest.”

“Right.” Moving carefully, Sun Wolf slid down the sharp slant of the roof, edged around a lead gargoyle, and lowered himself down to the oak spar of a decorated beam end that thrust itself out into space, a dozen feet above the dark slot of the alley that separated counting house from barracks wall. The gap was negligible, though the landing was narrow—eighteen inches at the top of the parapet. In this corner of the old defense works that had once surrounded this part of the grounds, the stonework looked neglected and treacherous. He jumped, out and down, his body flexing compactly as it hit the top of the crenellations, and he sprang neatly down to the catwalk a few feet below.

He looked back up to the roof. Sheera had the sense to keep moving, smoothly and swiftly, once she broke cover. The windy darkness of the night was such that everything seemed to be moving—it would have been difficult to distinguish the movement as human. Since his ordeal in the pit, Sun Wolf was aware that he could see clearly now in darkness—he thought that his sense of direction, always excellent, had improved as well. In the shadows, he could see Sheera’s face, tense and watchful, as she reached the edge of the roof. She lowered herself over, her feet feeling competently for the beam, her blackened arms momentarily silhouetted against the paler plaster of the house.

A cat-leap, and she was beside him. Silently, she scanned the dark bulk of the palace before them, then pointed southwest. Thanks to the alarm, the barracks were empty. They descended from the wall by the turret stair of the guardhouse itself, ducking through the stable wing that Sheera knew, from her acquaintance with Drypettis, ran the length of the west side of the grounds, merging with the kitchens on the southwest corner. As they dodged along the walls, in the darkness Sun Wolf could sense the restlessness of the horses in their stalls, excited by the winds and by the far-off turmoil from other quarters of the palace. At the first opportunity, he drew Sheera through the postern of the carriage house and thence up a ladder to the lofts that ran continuously over the long rows of boxes. Twice they heard the voices of grooms and sleepy, grouchy stable boys below them, but no one associated the uneasiness of the animals with anything but the wind.

Certainly the guards, running here and there throughout the rest of the palace grounds in search of unspecified anarchists out to bum the Records Office, never thought to look for them among the governor’s cattle.

From the loft, they climbed to the roof of the kitchens and over the tall, ridged backbone of the rooftree. Lights milled distantly, clustering around the tall, foursquare shapes of the northern administrative wing. To their left lay the south wall of the palace enclosure, hiding the Grand Canal behind its marble-faced stone; the lights of the great houses on the other side glittered few and faint at this hour, and their reflections thrown by the waters rippled over the stone lacework like moire silk.

Something was moving about in the dark space of the kitchen gardens. Dogs? the Wolf wondered. But in that case, there would be barking. Still, the noise was animal, not human.

From where he lay flattened on the slanted roof, he could make out the little postern and water stairs, through which Gilden, Wilarne, and Eo had said they’d entered, and the empty catwalk above it.

He heard quick, slipping movement on the tiles, and then warm flesh stretched out beside him. Sheera whispered, “Can we cross the garden without being seen?”

“There’s something down there,” the Wolf replied, barely above a breath. “Animals, I think—hunting cats or dogs.” He edged sideways, keeping his head below the final, crowning ridge of the kitchen roof, a sharp frieze work of saints and gargoyles, green with age where they were not crusted into unrecognizable lumps of white by long communion with the palace pigeons. The tiles were warmer under his bare flesh as he slipped around a great cluster of chimney pots and raised his head again.

“There,” he murmured. “The covered walkway from the kitchens into the state dining room. You said yourself, the times you’ve eaten with the governor, the food arrived three-quarters cold.”

“To be dropped on gold plates to complete the chilling,” Sheera agreed, quietly amused. “Yes, I see. That lighted window above and to the left will be the anteroom to his bedchamber. That one there is the window that lights the end of the hall.”

“Good.” Booted toes feeling for breaks in the tiles, he eased himself backward down the slant of the roof. Below him, the stable courts were a maze of rooftrees and wells of darkness. Wind flickered over his skin, stirring the long wisps of his hair. The tiles, offensive with moss and droppings, were rough under his groping hands, still only partially healed. At the bottom of the roof, a sort of gutter ran the length of the kitchens, and he slipped along it, moving swiftly, to the peaked end of the building that overlooked the edge of the gardens on the canal side. The wind was stronger here, channeled by the walls; it carried on it the fish smell of the sea and the high salt flavor of the wind. Down below him, the gardens were a restless murmuration of skeletal trees and brown, wiry networks of hedge, an uneasy darkness broken by anomalous shufflings.

Bracing himself on the gutter, the Wolf worked loose a tile. The noise of the wind that streamed like cool water over his body covered the scraping sounds of his task—indeed, they almost covered the sounds of the voices. He heard a man curse and froze, flattening himself on the uneven darkness of the roof and praying that the mix of lampblack and grease that covered his body hadn’t scraped off in patches to show the paler flesh beneath.

From below, he heard a guard’s thorough, businesslike cursing. A second voice said, “Nothing out here.”

“Any sign of Kran?”

Evidently a head was shaken; the Wolf pressed his face to the filthy tiles, wondering how long it would be until one or the other of them looked up.

“Damned funny, him missing a match-up with the guard on the next beat like that... If them troublemakers came in from this side...”

“When they’re out to bum the Records Office? Not qualified likely. Good thing them two sluts got us word of it...”

“So why check the stables? Rot that sergeant’s eyes...”

Then, with a curious, almost atavistic sensation, Sun Wolf knew that it was within his power to prevent the guards from looking up. It was nothing he had ever experienced before, but it tugged at him; an overwhelming knowledge of a technique, a shifting of the mind and attention, that he could not even define to himself. It was as natural as slashing after a parry, as ingrained in him as footwork; yet it was nothing he had done or even conceived of doing before. It was akin to the way he had always been able to avoid people’s eyes—but never from a position of complete exposure.

Without moving, without even looking down, he consciously and deliberately prevented either of them from looking up, as if he drew that thought from their minds by some process he had never known of, except in his childhood dreams. Whether it was for this reason, or because the night was cold and windy and the men disgruntled, neither did look up.

“Let’s get on, mate, I’m poxy freezing. There’s nothing here.”

“Aye. Rot his eyes, anyway ...”

A door closed. The Wolf lay for a moment on the windswept tiles, counting the retreat of their footfalls, until he was sure they were gone. Then he hefted the lump of loose tiles in his hand, leaned around the edge of the gable, and threw them down into the dark corner of garden beyond.

The tiles crashed noisily in the dry hedges below. The Wolf ducked back around the comer of the roof as more crashes answered, and whatever had been below—dogs or sentries—bounded to investigate. Hidden from them by the angle of the roof, he slid along the gutter and made his way, swift as a tomcat, up the slope to where Sheera lay. He could see movement flicker around the corner at the far end of the kitchens as he scrambled up beside her; in that short span of bought time, he half rose to climb over the uneven teeth of the roof ridge and down to the top of the walkway.

The walkway top was flat—a stupid thing, in as rainy a town as Mandrigyn. Probably leaks like a sieve all winter, he thought, crawling flat on his belly along it. A quick glance showed him Sheera directly behind, her body as grazed and filthy as his own; another quick glance showed him the gardens below, still empty. He addressed a brief request to his ancestors to keep them that way and scanned the available windows.

“Captain!” Sheera whispered.

He glanced back at her. The wind veered suddenly and he smelled smoke.

As a man adept at the starting of fires, he recognized it as new smoke, the first springing of a really commendable blaze. Looking, he saw it rolling in a formidable column from the north end of the palace, streaming in huge, white-edged billows in the wind. Voices were shouting, feet racing; everyone who had been turned out for the original alarm was dashing toward the fire, and everyone who had not was following close behind.

Gilden and Wilarne were nothing if not thorough.

Scrambling to the nearest window sill. Sun Wolf drove his boot through the glass.

It was, as Sheera had said, the end window of a long corridor, dimly lighted with lamps of amber glass and muffled by carpets of blue Islands work and iridescent silk. He ducked through the nearest door into an antechamber, searching for the way into the bedroom; then a noise behind him in the hall made him swing around. He saw Sheera, frozen in the act of following him into the doorway, black and filthy as a demon from one of the dirtier pits of Hell; and before her in the hall, his crippled body clothed in a lavish robe of crimson brocade and miniver and his prim face wearing an expression of profound and startled astonishment, was Derroug Dru himself.

For one instant, they faced each other; from the tenebrous antechamber. Sun Wolf saw the jump of the governor’s chest and the leap of breath in his throat as he inhaled to shout for the guards ...

He never made a sound. Sheera was taller than he and heavier; training day after day to the point of exhaustion had made her lightning-fast. For all his power to bend others to his will, Derroug was a cripple. Sun Wolf saw the dagger in Sheera’s hand but doubted that Derroug ever did. She caught the body and was dragging it into the anteroom, even as blood sprayed from the slashed arteries of the throat. The room stank of it, sharp and metallic above the suffocating weight of balsam incense. Her hands glistened in the faint reflection of the corridor lamps.

“Throw something over him,” Sun Wolf whispered as she pushed the door to behind her. “That cuts our time—pray Tisa really is here and we don’t have to go hunt for her.”

As Sheera bundled the body into a corner, he was already crossing the anteroom to the bolted door on the other side. He slammed back the bolts and stepped through. “Tisa...”

Something hit his shoulders and the back of his knee; cold and slim, an arm locked across his windpipe, and small hands knotted below the corner of his jaw in a strangle. Reflex took over. He roiled his shoulders forward, ducked, and threw. Incredibly light weight went sailing over his head, to slam like a soaked blanket into the deep furs of the floor.

Under the softness of the carpets was hard tile, and a thin little sob was wrenched from her, but Tisa was rolling to her feet as he caught her wrists. She’d kept her head clear of the impact, but tears of terror and pain streamed down her face. Then she saw who he was and turned her face away, ashamed that he should see her weep.

It was no time, the Wolf thought, to be a warrior—especially if one was fifteen and the victim of a powerful and cruel man. He gathered her into his arms. She was shaking with silent terror, burying her small, pointed face in the grimy muscle of his hard chest. Sheera stood silent in the doorway, her hands red to the elbows, watching as he stroked Tisa’s disheveled ivory hair and murmured to her as a father might to a child frightened by a nightmare.

“He’s dead,” he said softly. “It’s ail right. We’ve come to get you out, and he’s dead and won’t come after you.”

The girl stammered, “Mother...”

“Your mum’s out burning down the other side of the palace,” the Wolf said, in the same comforting accents. “She’s fine—”

Tisa raised her head, her cheek all smutched with blacking, green moss stains, and bird droppings. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, laughter and suspicion fighting through her tears.

The Wolf made wide eyes at her. “No,” he said. “Did you think I was?”

She wiped her eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m not crying,” she explained, after a moment.

“No,” he agreed. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Tisa.”

“You didn’t hurt me.” Her voice was shaky; the breath had been very soundly knocked out of her, if nothing else.

“Well, you damned near strangled me,” he returned gruffly. “You think you can swim?”

She nodded. She was wearing, he now saw, a kind of loose white robe, clearly given to her by Derroug. It was slightly too large for her and sewn over with white sequins and elaborate swirls of milky, opalescent beads. Against it, he saw her transformed, no longer a coltish girl, but a half-opened bud of womanhood. Her eyelids were stained dark with fatigue and terror, her hair pale against the silk, almost as light as Starhawk’s in the shimmer of the bedroom lamp. The gown was cut so as to reveal half her young bosom. Before taking her post to attack, she’d prosaically pinned the robe with a ruby stickpin that glowed beneath her collarbone like a huge bead of blood.

She was as light as a flower in his hands as he lifted her to her feet. Her eyes lighted on Sheera and widened at the sight of the blood.

Sun Wolf whispered, “Let’s go. They’ll be looking for him, now that the fire’s started.”

As they slipped back through the anteroom and out the window, Tisa breathed, “What happened to your voice, Captain? And I thought...”

“Not now.”

Obediently, she gathered handfuls of her voluminous skirts and followed Sheera down onto the roof of the walkway. Even to his sharper eyes, the gardens below looked deserted. He could see, vague against the deeper dark of the shadowed wall, the shape of the postern gate.

“Wait here till I signal,” he said softly. “A whistle like a nightjar. Then keep to the shadows along the wall. If it’s locked, we’ll have to go up the steps to the parapet and dive.”

Sheera gauged the height of the wall. “Thank God it’s the Grand Canal. It’s the deepest one in the city.”

Sun Wolf slithered down the side of the walkway and into the gardens below.

The overcast was growing thicker with the night winds that fanned the blaze on the north end of the palace. The din was audible over the moaning of the wind. It should keep them all busy for at least another hour, he calculated and began to move, slowly and cautiously, along the wall toward the inky wells of shadow that lay between him and the gate.

The blackness here was almost absolute; a month ago he would have been able to see nothing. As it was, he was aware of shapes and details with a sense that he was not altogether certain was sight—an effect of the anzid, he guessed, as well as that curious ability to prevent people from looking at him.

That would come in handy, he thought. Come to think of it, he realized he had used it twice before tonight—when he’d evaded Sheera almost unthinkingly in the narrow confines of the potting room, and earlier this evening, when he had first come down the stairs to hear the war council in the orangery. The professional in him toyed with ways of developing that strange talent; but deep within him, a tug of primitive excitement shivered in his bones, as it had done when he had first known that he could see demons and others could not.

The postern was unguarded, but locked. He glanced around the blackness under the gate arch and found the narrow stair to the parapet above. The garden behind him still appeared deserted, but a tension, a premonition of danger, had begun to prickle at the nape of his neck. The brush and hedges seemed to rustle too much, and the wind, laden with smoke and shouting, seemed somehow to carry the scent of evil to his nostrils. He whistled softly, like a nightjar, and saw swift movement near the covered walk, then the flash of Tisa’s almost luminous white gown.

They were halfway across the garden when something else moved, from around the comer of the kitchen building.

The things were armored like men, but weaponless. From where he stood at the bottom of the parapet stair, the Wolf could see that they walked steadily, oblivious to the darkness that made the fugitive women’s steps so halting and slow. They moved so softly that he wasn’t sure Sheera and Tisa were aware of them, but his own sharpened vision showed them clearly to him. There were four, wearing the fouled liveries of Derroug’s guards, their eyeless heads swinging as if they also could see in darkness.

They were nuuwa.

Realization hit him, and horrible enlightenment, as if pieces of some huge and ghastly puzzle had fallen into place. Rage and utter loathing swept over him, such as he had never felt toward anyone or anything before. The nuuwa began to lope. Sheera swung around, hearing the steps on the grass, but her eyes were unable to pierce the utter darkness.

Sun Wolf bellowed, “Run for it! Here!”

His sword whined from its sheath. Unquestioning, the women ran, Tisa stripping out of her billowing white robe as it caught on the dead limbs of a thorn hedge. They ran blindly, stumbling, blundering through soft earth and gray tangles of vine and hedge, and the nuuwa plunged soundlessly after. He yelled again, a half-voiceless croaking that was answered by wild commotion in the windows of the palace behind them. Tisa hit the stairs first, with Sheera a few strides behind. The nuuwa were hard on their heels, running sightlessly with the drool glistening on those gaping, deformed mouths.

Sword naked in his hand. Sun Wolf followed the women up the steps, the foremost of the pursuers not three feet behind. At the top of the wall, Tisa dived, plunging down into the dark murk of the canal; Sheera’s dark-stained, gleaming body outlined momentarily against the reflected lamps in the villas across the way as she followed. When the Wolf reached the parapet, huge hands dug into his flesh from behind, and he writhed away from the fangs that tore like great wedges of rusty iron into his shoulder. He turned, ripping with his sword, knowing he had only seconds until they were all on him, literally eating him alive. As the blade cleaved the filthy flesh of the nuuwa’s body, the misshapen face was inches from his own, the huge mouth still rending at him, flowing with blood, the empty eye sockets scabbed wells of shadow.

Then he was plunging down, and the freezing, salty, unspeakably filthy waters of the canal swallowed him. The nuuwa, nothing daunted, flung themselves over the wall after their prey. Weighted in their armor, too blind and too stupid to swim, they sank like stones.

In her usual silence, Yirth gathered up her medicines and glided from the dim confines of the loft. Sun Wolf lay still for a time, staring up at the slant of the ceiling over his head, as he had stared at it four mornings ago, when he had awakened to know that Sheera had indeed won.

But there was no thought of Sheera now in his mind.

He was thinking now of Lady Wrinshardin, of Derroug Dru, and of Altiokis.

He felt weak from loss of blood, woozy and aching from the pain of Yirth’s remedies. Against his cheek on the pillow, his hair was damp, and his flesh chilled where the lampblack and grease had been sponged off it. Sheera, in her velvet bed, and Tisa, safe at the Thane of Wrinshardin’s castle, would both be striped like tigers with bruises and scratches from that last crashing flight through the gardens.

He himself scarcely felt the pain. Knowledge still burned in him, and the heat of fury that knowledge had brought; deformed, hideous, the face of the nuuwa returned to his thoughts, no matter what he did to push it aside. The grayish light beyond the window grew broader, and he wondered if he had best get up and go about his business for the benefit of whatever servants of the household might be questioned by Derroug’s successors.

Weakness weighted his limbs. He was still lying there when the door of the orangery opened and shut, and he heard the creak of light feet on the steps, the soft, thick slur of satin petticoats, and the stiff rubbing of starched lace.

He turned his head. Sheera stood in the doorway, where she had so seldom come before. Cosmetics covered the scratches on her face; but below the paint, he thought she looked pale and drawn. In that crowded and terrible night, he realized, she had avenged herself on Derroug. But it had been a businesslike, almost unthinking revenge.

“I came to thank you for last night,” she said tiredly. “And—to apologize for things that I said. You did not have to do what you did.”

“I told you before,” Sun Wolf rasped, his new voice still scraping oddly in his ears. “All it would have taken was for our girl to tackle Derroug the way she tackled me for there to have been a lot of questions asked. And as for the other business—you were tired and I was drunk. That should never have happened.”

“No,” Sheera said. “It shouldn’t have.” She rubbed her eyes, the clusters of pearl and sardonyx that decorated her ears and hair flickering in the wan light of morning. “I’ve come to tell you that you’re free to leave Mandrigyn. I’m going to speak to Yirth—to have her give you the antidote to the anzid—to let you go. For what you did...”

He held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped forward, and he drew her to sit on the edge of his bed. Her fingers felt like ice in his.

“Sheera,” he said, “that doesn’t matter now. When you march to the mines—when you free the men—what are you going to do?”

Taken off guard, she stammered, “I—we—Tarrin and I will lead them back here...”

“No,” he said. “Lady Wrinshardin was right, Sheera. Yirth is right. Don’t wait for Altiokis to come to you. Those ways from the mines up to the Citadel itself—could Amber’s girls find them?”

“I suppose,” she said hesitantly. “Crazyred says she’s seen one of them. But they’re guarded by magic, by traps...”

“Yirth will have to deal with that,” he told her quietly. “She’ll have to find some way to get you through them—and she will, or die trying. Sheera, Altiokis has to be destroyed. He’s got an evil up there worse than anything I imagined—and he’s breeding it, creating it, calling it up out of some other world, I don’t know. Lady Wrinshardin guessed it; Yirth knows it. He has to be destroyed, and that evil with him.”

Sheera was silent, looking down at her hands where they rested among the folds of her gown. Once she might have triumphed over his admission that she was right and he wrong—but that had been before the pit, and before the garden last night.

Watching her eyes, he realized that, since she had spoken with Lady Wrinshardin, she had known in her heart that they would have to storm the Citadel.

He went on. “Those were nuuwa that pursued us from Derroug’s gardens last night. Nuuwa under the control of Altiokis, I would guess—as nuuwa under his control are said to march in his armies. When he’s done with them—as he was after the battle of Iron Pass—he turns most of them out, to overrun the conquered lands; or else he gives them over to his governors as watchdogs. I think they deform, they deteriorate, in time—and that’s why Altiokis and Derroug have to go on creating new ones.”

“Creating?” She raised her head quickly; he could see in her face the hideous comprehension knocking on the doors of her mind, as it had knocked on his last night.

“You remember that room in Derroug’s prison? That—that thing that looked like a flake of fire, or a shining dragonfly?”

She glanced away, nauseated by the memory. After a moment, the thick curls of her hair slipped across her red satin shoulder as she nodded. He felt her cold fingers tighten over his.

“That red-haired boy became the creature who tore up my shoulder last night,” he told her.