The Ladies of Mandrigyn

5

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 stave, 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 heal 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 halt” 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 cathedra], 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.

He had to admit that Sheera had not erred in her choice of location. The orangery was the farthest building from the house, forming the southern end of the quadrangle of its outbuildings. A strip of drying yard, the property wall, and the muddy, greenish canal called Mothersditch separated it from the nearest other building, the great laundries of St. Quillan, which closed up at the third hour of the night. There was little chance they would be overheard if they practiced here.

He lay in the darkness on his narrow cot, listened to the high-pitched, muted babble in the room below, and thought about women.

Women. Human beings who are not men.

Who had said that to him once? Starhawk—last winter, or the winter before, when she was explaining something about that highly individual fighting style of hers... It was something he had not thought of at the time. Now it came back to him, with the memory of those gray, enigmatic eyes.

Human beings who are not men.

Even as a child, he had understood that the demons that haunted the empty marshlands around his village were entities like himself, intelligent after their fashion, but not human. Push them, and they did not react like men.

He had met men who feared women and he understood that fear. Not a physical fear—indeed, it was this type of man who was often guilty of the worst excesses during the sacking of a city. This fear was something deeper. And yet the other side of that coin was the yearning to touch, to possess, the desire for the soft and alien flesh.

There was no logic to it. But training this troop wasn’t going to be like training a troop of inexperienced boys, or of men, none of whom weighed over a hundred and thirty pounds.

The day’s rain had broken after sundown. A watery gleam of moonlight painted the slanted wall above his head. With the cold wind, voices from the garden blew in—Sheera’s, speaking to those wealthier women who had come, as if to a party, in their gondolas to the front door of her great, marble-faced townhouse. Women’s voices, like music in the wet night.

Was it training, he wondered, that made women distrustful of one another? The fact that so much was denied them? Maybe, especially in a city like Mandrigyn, where the women were close-kept and forbidden to do those things that would free them from the tutelage of men. He’d seen that before—the hothouse atmosphere of gossip and petty jealousies, of wrongs remembered down through the years arid unearthed, fresh and stinking, on the occasions of quarrels. Would women be different if they were brought up differently?

Would men?

His father’s bitter, mocking laughter echoed briefly through his mind.

Then he became aware that someone was standing by the foot of his bed.

He had not seen her arrive, nor heard the petal-fall of her feet on the floorboards. Only now he saw her face, floating like a misshapen skull above the dark blob of the birthmark, framed in the silver-shot masses of her hair. He was aware that she had been standing there for some time.

“What the...” he began, rising, and she held up her hand.

“I have only come to lay on you the bounding-spells to hold the poison in your veins harmless, so long as you remain in Mandrigyn,” she said. “As I am not a true wizard, not come to the fullness of my power, I cannot work spells at a distance by the mind alone.” Like a skeleton hand, her white fingers moved in the air, and she added, “It is done.”

“You did it all right on the ship,” he grumbled sullenly.

One end of that black line of eyebrow moved. “You think so? It is one of the earliest things wizards know—how to come and go unnoticed, even by someone who might be looking straight at them.” She gathered her cloak about her, a rustling in the darkness, preparing to go. “They are downstairs now. Will you join them?”

“Why should I?” he asked, settling his shoulders back against the wall at the bed’s head. “I’m only the hired help.”

The rosewood voice was expressionless. “Perhaps to see what you will have to contend with? Or to let them see it?”

After a moment, he got to his feet, the movement of his shoulders easing a little the unaccustomed pressure of the chain. As he came closer to her, he saw how ravaged Yirth’s face was by exhaustion. The black smudges beneath her eyes, the harsh lines of strain, did nothing for her looks. The last days of the voyage were worn into her face and spirit as coal dust wore itself into a miner’s hands—to be lightened by time, maybe, but never to be eradicated.

He paused, looking into those cold, green eyes. “Does Sheera know this?” he asked. “If, as you say, you aren’t a true wizard—if you haven’t come to the fullness of your power—it’s insanity for you to go against a wizard who’s been exercising his powers for a hundred and fifty years—who’s outlived every other wizard in the world and seems to be deathless. Does Sheera know you’re not even in his class?”

“She does.” Yirth’s voice was cool and bitter in the darkness of the room. “It is because of Altiokis that I have not—and will never—come to the fullness of my power as a wizard. My master Chilisirdin gave me the knowledge and the training that those who are born with a mage’s powers must have. It is that training which allows me to wring the winds to my commanding, to hold you prisoned, to see through the illusions and the traps with which Altiokis guards the mines. But Chilisirdin was murdered—murdered before she could give to me the secret of the Great Trial. And without that, I will never have the Power.”

Sun Wolf’s eyes narrowed. “The what?” he asked. In the language of the West, the word connoted a judicial ordeal as well as tribulation; in the northern dialect, the word was sometimes used to mean death as well.

The misshapen nostrils flared in scorn. “You are a man who prides himself on his ignorance of these things,” she remarked. “Like love, you can never be sure when they will cross your life, will or nil. Of what the Great Trial consisted I never knew—only that it killed those who were not born with the powers of a mage. Its secret was handed down from master to pupil through generations. I have sought for many years to find even one of that last generation of wizards, or one of their students, who might know what it was—who might have learned how one did this thing that melds the power born into those few children with the long learning they must acquire from a master wizard. But Altiokis has murdered them all, or driven them into hiding so deep that they dare not reveal to any what they are—or what they could have been. That is why I threw in my lot with Sheera. Altiokis has robbed us all—all of us who would have been mages and who are now condemned to this half-life of thwarted longings. It is for me to take revenge upon him, or to die in the trying.”

“That’s your choice,” the Wolf said quietly. “What I object to is your hauling me with you—me and all those stupid women downstairs who think they’re going to be trained to be warriors.”

The voices rose to them, a light distant babbling, like the pleasant sounds of a spring brook in the darkness. Yirth’s eyes flashed like a cat’s. “They also have their revenge to take,” she replied. “And as for you, you would die for the sake of the two pennies they will put upon your eyes, to pay the death gods to ferry you to Hell.”

“Yes,” he agreed tightly. “But that’s my choice—of time and manner and whom I take with me when I go.”

She sniffed. “You have no choice, my friend. You were made what you are by the father who spawned you—as I was made when I was born with the talent for wizardry in my heart and this mark like a piece of thrown offal on my face. You had no more choice in the matter than you had about the color of your eyes.”

She gathered the dark veil about her once again, to cover her ugliness, and in silence descended the stairs.

After a moment, Sun Wolf followed her.

A few candles had been lighted on the table near the staircase, but their feeble light penetrated no more than a dozen feet into the vast wooden vault of the orangery. All that could be seen in that huge darkness was the multiplied reflection in hundreds of watching eyes. Like the wind dying on the summer night, the sound of talking hushed as Sun Wolf stepped into the dim halo of light, a big, feral, golden man, with Yirth like a fell black shadow at his heels.

He had not expected to see so many women. Startled, he cast a swift glance at Yirth, who returned an enigmatic stare. “Where the hell did they come from?” he whispered.

She brushed the thick, silver-shot mane back over her shoulders. “Gilden Shorad,” she replied softly. “She and her partner Wilarne M’Tree are the foremost hairdressers in Mandrigyn. There isn’t a woman in the city they cannot speak to at will, from noblewomen like Sheera and Drypettis Dru down to common whores.”

Sun Wolf looked out at them again—there must have been close to three hundred women there, sitting on the worn and dusty pine of the floor or on the edges of the big earth tubs that contained the orange trees. Smooth, beardless faces turned toward him; he was aware of watching eyes, bright hair, and small feet tucked up underneath the colors of the long skirts. Whether it was from their numbers alone, or whether the hypocaust under the floor had been fired, the huge, barn like room was warm, and the smell of old dirt and citrus was mingled with the smells of women and of perfume. The rustle of their gowns and of the lace on the wrists of the rich ones was like a summer forest.

Then silence.

Into that silence, Sheera spoke.

“We got back from Kedwyr today,” she said without preamble, and her clear, rather deep voice penetrated easily into the fusty brown shadows of the room. “All of you know why we went. You put your money into the venture and your hearts—did without things, some of you, to contribute; or put yourselves in danger; or did things that you’d rather not have done to get the money. You know the value of what you gave—I certainly do.”

She stood up, the gold of her brocade gown turned her into a glittering flame, the stiff lace of her collar tangling with the fire-jewels in her hair. From where he stood behind her, Sun Wolf could see the faces of the women, rapt to silence, their eyes drinking in her words.

“All of you know the plan,” she continued, leaning her rump against the edge of the table, her gem-bright hands relaxed among the folds of her skirts. “To hire mercenaries, storm the mines, free the men, and liberate the city from Altiokis and the pack of vultures he’s put in charge. I want you to know right away that I couldn’t hire anyone.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised,” she went on. “Winter’s coming. Nobody wants to fight a winter war. Every man’s first loyalty is to himself, and nobody wanted to risk Altiokis’ wrath, not even for gold. I understand that.”

Her voice rose a little, gaining strength and power. “But for them it’s only money. For us it’s our lives. There isn’t a woman here who doesn’t have a man-lover, husband, father—who either died at Iron Pass or was enslaved there. And that was every decent man in the city; every man who had the courage to march in Tarrin’s army in the first place, every man who understood what would happen if Altiokis added Mandrigyn to his empire. We’ve seen it in other cities—at Racken Scrag, and at Kilpithie. We’ve seen him put the corrupt, the greedy, and the unscrupulous into power—the men who’ll toad-eat to him for the privilege of making their own money out of us. We’ve seen him put such a man in charge here.”

Their eyes went to Drypettis Dru, who had come in with Sheera and taken her seat as close to the table as she could, almost literally sitting at her leader’s feet. Throughout the speech, she had been silent, gazing up at Sheera with the passionate gleam of fanaticism in her brown eyes, her little hands clenched desperately in her lap; but as the women looked at her, she sat up a bit.

“You have all heard the evil reports of Derroug,” Sheera said in a quieter tone. “I think there are some of you who have—had experience with his—habits.” Her dark eyes flashed somberly. “You will know that his own sister has turned against him and has been like my right hand in organizing our cause.”

“Not turned against him,” Drypettis corrected in her rather high, breathless voice. “My brother’s actions have always been deplorable and repugnant to me. He has disgraced our house, which was the highest in the city. For that I shall never forgive him. Nor for his lewdness toward you, nor—”

“Nor shall any of us forgive him, Drypettis,” Sheera said, cutting short what threatened to turn into a discursive catalog of the governor’s sins. “We have all seen the evil effects of Altiokis’ rule starting here in Mandrigyn. If it is to be stopped, we must stop it now.

“We must stop it,” she repeated, and her voice pressed heavily on the words. “We are fighting for more than just ourselves. We all have children. We all have families—or had them.” A murmur stirred like wind through the room. “Since we can’t hire men, we have to learn to do what we can ourselves.”

She looked about her, into that shadowy, eye-glittering silence. The candlelight caught in the stiff fabric of her golden gown, making her flash like an upraised sword blade.

“We’ve all done it,” she said. “Since Iron Pass, you’ve all stepped in to take over your husbands’ affairs, in one way or another. Erntwyff, you go out every day with the fishing fleet. Most of the fleet is now manned by fishermen’s wives, isn’t it? Eo, you’ve taken over the forge ...”

“Had to,” said a big, cowlike woman, whose whips of ivory-fair hair marked her as a relation of Gilden Shorad’s. “Woulda starved, else.”

“And you’ve taken Gilden’s daughter Tisa for your apprentice, too, haven’t you? Sister Quincis, they tell me they’ve even been appointing women as provisional priests in the Cathedral, something they haven’t done in hundreds of years. Fillibi, you’re running your husband’s store—and running it damned well, too... And nobody cares whether any of you wears a veil or not, or has a chaperon. Business is business.

“Well, our business is defending the city and freeing the men. We’ve all proved women can work as well as men. I think they can fight as well as men, too.

“I think all of you know,” she continued, her voice growing grave, “that if you put a woman with her back to the wall, fighting, not for herself, but for her man, her children, and her home, she’s braver than a man, tougher than a man—hell, she’s tougher than a cornered rat. And, ladies, that’s where we are.”

If she asked for volunteers, they’d turn out to a woman, the Wolf thought. She has a king’s magic: that magic of trust.

Damned arrogant bitch.

Sheera’s voice was low; a pin could have been heard dropping in the breathing silence of the orangery. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t hire men to do it. But I hired one man—to come here and teach us to do it ourselves, we’re wilting to fight. There’s a difference between just giving money, no matter how much money, and picking up a sword yourself. And I tell you, ladies—now is the time to see that difference.”

They could not applaud, for the sound would carry, but the silence was a magic crown on those dark curls. Point them the way, Sun Wolf thought cynically, and they’d march to the mines tonight, the silly bitches, and be dead by morning. Like too many rulers, Sheera had the quality of making others ready to go out and fight without ever asking themselves what it would cost them.

He gave himself a little shove with his shoulder against the doorframe and walked to where she stood before them in that aura of candle flame, flamelike herself in her golden gown. At this movement, she turned her head, surprised. Maybe she didn’t think I’d speak, he thought, with a prickle of anger at that certainty of hers. He turned to the devouring sea of eyes.

“What Sheera says is true,” he agreed quietly, the gravelly rumble of his voice pitched, as a leader must know how to pitch it, to the size of his troop. “A woman fighting for her children—or occasionally for a man—will fight like a cornered rat. But I’ve driven rats into corners and killed them with the toe of my boot, and don’t think that can’t happen to you.”

Sheera swung around, the whole of her body glittering with rage. He caught her gaze and silenced her, as if he had laid a hand over her mouth. After a moment, his eyes returned to the women.

“So all right, I agreed to teach you, to make warriors out of you; and by the spirits of my ancestors, I’ll do it, if I have to break your necks. But I want you all to understand what it is you’re doing.

“War is serious. War is dead serious. You are all smaller, lighter, and slower on the run than men. If you expect to beat men in combat, you had damned well better be twice as good as they are. I can make you twice as good. That’s my job. But in the process, you’re going to get cut up, you’re going to get hurt, you’re going to get shouted at and cursed, and you’ll crawl home so exhausted you can hardly stand up, because that’s the only way to get good, especially if you’re little enough for some man to lift and carry away under his arm.” His eyes picked the diminutive Gilden Shorad out of the crowd and met a hard, challenging, sea-blue stare.

“So if you don’t think you can finish the race, don’t waste my time by starting it. Whenever I get a batch of new recruits, I end up shaking out about half of them, anyway. You don’t have to be tough lo start—I’ll make you tough. But you have to stay with it. And you have to be committed to killing people and maybe losing a limb or losing your life. That’s war.”

His eyes raked them, gleaming like a gold beast’s in the dimness: the whores, sweet as all the spices of the East with their curled hair and painted eyes; the brown laborer women, prematurely old, like bundles of dowdy serge; the wives of merchants, now many of them merchants themselves, soft and well cared for in their lace and jewels.

“You decide if you can do it or not,” he said quietly. “I want my corps here tomorrow night at this time. That’s all.”

He turned and met Sheera’s eyes. Under her lowered lids he could see the speculation, the curiosity and reevaluation, as if she were wondering what she had brought to Mandrigyn.