Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (3 page)

Starhawk’s glance cut sharply to Sun Wolf. She saw that he wasn’t surprised.

“It was men like Norbas Milkom and Quaal Ambergados—miners and fighters, men who know the land. Men like . . . ” Osgard turned and regarded Sun Wolf with an arrested eye. “I know you,” he said.

Sun Wolf nodded. “Likely you do, your Majesty.”

“Not just from the tavern . . . ” The green eyes narrowed. “You’re Sun Wolf. The mercenary of Wrynde. We hired you—what . . . ?”

“Last war but one with Dalwirin,” Sun Wolf provided. “Old Shilmarne was leading her forces down the passes . . . ”

“By the Three, that was it!” The King slapped Sun Wolf enthusiastically on the back, then staggered. He’d taken a thigh wound, and blood was still tracking stickily down the leg of his breeches. Sun Wolf and Starhawk caught him as his knees gave way, Nanciormis springing belatedly to help.

Osgard made an impatient move to push them off. “I’m fine . . . ”

“The hell you are,” Sun Wolf rasped. He pulled from some inner pocket the silk scarf he’d long ago learned to keep handy and tied it around Osgard’s leg above the wound. With the hilt of one of the hideout daggers in his boot, he twisted it tight. In the yellow glare of the torchlight, the King’s face had gone suddenly waxen as the heat of battle died from his veins. “There a sawbones up at the fortress?”

Nanciormis nodded. “Can you sit a horse, my—”

“Of course I can sit a horse!” Osgard blustered furiously. “Just because I took a little scratch doesn’t mean I’m going to go to pieces like some sniveling, weakling coward . . . ” His sandy eyebrows stood out darkly against his gray flesh, and, like a candle being blown out, he fainted.

“Good,” Sun Wolf grunted, as they eased him gently back to lay him on the sand. “With luck he’ll stay unconscious and won’t argue about his pox-rotted manhood all the way up to the Fortress.”

The guards looked shocked, but, in the commander Nanciormis’ eye, he caught the flicker of an appreciative grin.

In the fortress of Tandieras supper was over, the trestle tables in the Great Hall put away, and the chairs and benches pushed back against the walls of the vast, granite room which was the old castle’s heart. Like the Longhorn Inn, it was lit chiefly by wall sconces whose polished metal reflectors threw back the soft beeswax glow into the room, but here the height of the ceiling, though it added to the cold, at least relieved the smoke. In addition, a huge fireplace stretched along one side of the feasting-dais at the far end, around which carved chairs were clustered, and two chandeliers dangled—unlit, massive, ominous iron wheels—in the dense shadows overhead.

But Sun Wolf’s first impression, as he stepped through the triple archway that led from the vestibule into the Hall, was one of color, gaiety, and movement. Since it was the season of sandstorms, the big wooden shutters that guarded the line of tall windows on the room’s southern wall had been closed nearly to for the night. Servants in drab shirts and breeches, gently born retainers in colorful broadcloth and white ruffs, and guards in dark green leather were grouped around the sides of the Hall, clapping in time to the music of pipes, flutes, and the fast, heartbreaking throb of a hand-drum; in the center of the Hall, lit by hand-held lamps and torches all around her, a girl was doing a war dance.

It was one of the old war dances of the Middle Kingdoms, done these days for the sheer joy of its violent measures. A young man and a girl in guard’s uniforms stood aside, sweat-soaked and panting, having clearly just finished their turn. As the dancer’s shadow flickered across them, the blades below her glinted. They were using live weapons. But for all the concern on her face, the girl might have been dancing around and over a circle of wheat sheaves; her feet, clad in light riding boots under a kilted-up skirt, tapped at will, now this side, now that side, of the blued edges of the upturned swords. She looked to be about sixteen; her sand-blond hair, mixed fair and dark, caught the light on its thick curls; the torches were not brighter than her eyes.

Beside him, Sun Wolf was aware of Nanciormis striding through the arch into the room, his mouth open to call out the ill news. Sun Wolf caught the man’s thick arm and said softly, “Don’t startle her.”

The guards’ commander saw what he meant and checked, then blustered, “No, of course I wasn’t going to.” He signaled one of the pages to come over and whispered hasty instructions to the boy. The young face paled in the torchlight with shock. “Go on!” Nanciormis ordered, and the page went slipping off through the crowd toward the little knot of gentlemen-in-waiting who stood between the fireplace and the door that led from the dais to the King’s solar beyond. Nanciormis glanced defensively back at Sun Wolf. “We can’t let his Majesty remain out in the cold court!”

At that moment the music skirled to its circling conclusion; the girl stood panting and radiant in the tawny halo of the lights. A woman hastened down to her from the crowd on the dais, skinny and flustery, her narrow, white face framed unbecomingly in tight-pulled, black hair. She dressed in black, too; the harshness of the color triggered something in Sun Wolf’s memory. She had been one of Kaletha’s disciples in the public gardens that afternoon. She touched the girl’s arm and said something. Stricken, the girl turned eyes wide with shock and green as absinthe toward the doorway; without a word she strode toward them, the black-clothed governess hurrying behind like a skinny ewe sheep who has fostered a gazelle.

“Uncle, is Father all right?” she demanded as soon as she got near enough to Sun Wolf and Nanciormis to speak. “Anshebbeth says—”

“Your father’s fine, Tazey.”

“You ought to send at once for the Lady Kaletha,” the black-clothed woman panted, fussing up behind them. “She can—”

“We already did, Anshebbeth.”

“I could go look for her—I know right where she—”

“It’s been taken care of.” Nanciormis’ voice was soothing. Anshebbeth’s long white fingers clasped and unclasped nervously; her huge, dark eyes darted to Nanciormis’ face, then to Sun Wolf’s body—a look that was covert but unmistakable—then back again, her cheeks coloring slightly. Sun Wolf wondered whether the blush was because he was aware of the thoughts behind that look or simply that she was. Unaware, Nanciormis went on easily, “Captain Sun Wolf—my niece, the Princess Taswind—her governess the Lady Anshebbeth.”

Guards were carrying the unconscious King into the hall. Gentlemen and ladies hurried to open the door through to the solar and to kindle lamps there; Tazey sprang after them, catching up her skirts as if impatient with their weight. Sun Wolf observed the lace trim of her petticoat and the slim strength of her calf in its soft boot before the sharp jab of a bony knee in his thigh made him look around; but Starhawk, who had materialized at his side, was looking around the room, innocently impassive.

Down in the hall, one of the underservants, a thickset hag with puffy ankles showing under a kilted-up skirt and black eyes glinting through a straggling pelt of gray hair, called out in a screechy voice, “Slow getting out the back window, was he, when the husband came home? Hard to run with his breeches around his ankles!”

Tazey didn’t even check her stride, but Anshebbeth stopped, stiff with rage and indignation, torn for a moment between staying to take issue with the old woman and remaining with her nurseling. Then, as if she realized she would not come off the better in any battle of words, she spun and hurried after Tazey into the narrow solar door.

“Did you see who they were?” Nanciormis asked quietly, as he led Sun Wolf and the Hawk toward the carved chairs on the dais near the fire. A servant girl came up to take his heavy white cloak and returned his smile with a saucy wink; Sun Wolf, as he and Starhawk divested themselves of their scarred sheepskin coats, observed that Nanciormis drew the admiring eyes of several of the women of the Household. Though corpulent, he was a good-looking man still; but beyond that, Sun Wolf guessed he was the type of man whose vitality would attract women, no matter how fat he became. Even on short acquaintance and in spite of his carelessness about breaking into the delicate concentration needed for the war dance, Sun Wolf found the man likable.

He made a mental note to take that into account.

“Your people, it looked like.”

Nanciormis checked his stride. His long hair, braided down from the temples and hanging in a loose mane of black curls behind, caught the sheen of the lamps as he jerked his head around.

“The shirdar—the desert folk,” the Wolf went on. “There was a little trouble at the Longhorn—four of ’em proposed a toast to the Princess Taswind’s prospective husband—I take it the match is about as popular as maggots in the beer hereabouts. A man named Norbas Milkom was the cause of it, though why they attacked the King . . . ”

The commander groaned, and all wariness fled from his eyes. “I should have known. No, the match isn’t a popular one.” He grinned ruefully and took a seat in one of the chairs by the hearth—heavy ebony from the forests of Kimbu in the south, re-cushioned with local work of red leather. “Beyond a doubt, they attacked the King because he was foolish enough to walk back alone—unlike our canny Norbas. It’s known throughout the desert they’ve been friends for forty years—if indeed they were the same shirdar as the ones at the Longhorn.”

A servant came up—the same who had taken their coats—with an intricately worked brass tray holding wine cups and dates in a hammered silver bowl. Sun Wolf saw now that she, like Nanciormis and, he guessed, Anshebbeth also, was of the shirdar, though without the reserved dignity of their ways. Along the foothills, they must have been living among and marrying with the ex-slaves of the north for generations. When she thought no one was looking, she mouthed a kiss at Nanciormis; he received it with a suppressed smile and a dance of pleasure in his pouchy dark eyes.

He went on, “They may have been merely bandits—there are a lot of them along the cordillera—or they may have been operating by the same logic used by the men of Wenshar when they kill Hasdrozidar of the Dunes or Seifidar of the White Erg in retaliation for Regidar slave-raids, not troubling to inquire the truth. All of our people here are looked upon with mistrust by those who came from the north of the mountains.”

“With reason,” a quiet voice said at his elbow. Sitting with his back to a comer and his blind side to Starhawk, Sun Wolf had seen the slender old man approach them—he would, indeed, have been difficult to miss. He was wearing what Starhawk irreverently described as the undress uniform of Trinitarian bishops, and his scarlet surcoat and gold tabard picked up the torchlight on their bullion embroidery as if the old man were netted all over with a spiderweb of flame. Garnet and rock crystal flashed from the worked medallions of sacred signs; even the sleeves of his white under-robe were stitched with tiny seed pearls. Under all that finery, the old man would have been as pretty as a girl before he grew his beard; full, slightly pouting red lips showed beneath the silky white mustaches; the eyes with their snowy lashes were the clear blue of morning sky.

In a soft, light voice, the Bishop went on, “It is fellowship of worship that binds men together in trust, Nanciormis. You have converted to the true faith of the Triple God, but can the same be said of the shirdar in the guards? It can not. They cling to their old superstitions, their familial cults and wind djinns. How can any true worshiper believe their oaths?”

“I’m sure they can’t,” Starhawk remarked, lying half-slouched in her chair and regarding him with mild gray eyes. “But the question’s rather academic, isn’t it, since the Doctrines of Calcedus say that true worshipers aren’t obliged to keep oaths made to the followers of untrue gods.”

The old Bishop spread his hands deprecatingly. “We are doves in the midst of serpents, Warlady,” he explained. “We need such subterfuge to survive.”

She studied the obvious wealth and power reflected in those splendid robes and glanced over at Sun Wolf. “I never met a Trinitarian yet who didn’t have a good explanation for everything.”

The Bishop inclined his white head. “It is because all truths are revealed to us by Holy Scripture.”

There was a stirring in the shadows beyond the fireplace; Sun Wolf had already, in his automatic identification of every potential exit from the room, seen the narrow door half-hidden beside the blackened granite of the mantle. Now Kaletha stepped through into the light, followed by another one of her disciples, the only one that afternoon who had not, like her, worn black. Since what he did wear was the blue and gold habit of a Trinitarian novice, he was naturally taken aback when he saw the Bishop. He said, rather loudly, “As I told you, my Lady Kaletha, the King is in his bedchamber beyond the solar.”

“Thank you, Egaldus.” Kaletha inclined her head graciously and moved toward the dais in a queenly swishing of homespun black robes. After a second’s hesitation, the young man, fair-haired and rather nervous looking, turned with clearly manufactured decisiveness and went bustling away in the other direction. Sun Wolf’s glance slid to the Bishop, but the old man didn’t seem to suspect anything; he was watching Kaletha’s approach with a disapproving eye.

“A pity,” he said, “that the only healer in the fortress should be a witch.”

Kaletha paused on the outside of the ring of firelight, regarding them with an expression that could have nipped spring flowers in their buds. Sun Wolf, feeling that frigid glance pause for a moment on him before passing on, was suddenly conscious of the dust in his clothes and hair and the bruises from the fight that marked his face; Kaletha looked away, as if to say one could have expected to find Sun Wolf on hand in the aftermath of a brawl. To the Bishop she said, “We’ve been over it time and again, Galdron. It’s scarcely likely that your condemnation of my powers one more time will cause me to go against what I know to be my destiny and my duty.”

“It is scarcely likely,” agreed the little man mildly, “but, as Bishop of Wenshar and, therefore responsible for the salvation of your soul from the sulfurous hells reserved for witches, I can yet hope.”