Gwenael Read online

  Gwenael

  By

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

  Copyright 2018 Barbara Hambly

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please include this license and copyright page. If you did not download this ebook yourself, consider going to Smashwords.com and doing so; authors love knowing when people are seeking out their material. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author!

  Table of Contents

  Gwenael

  About the Author

  Gwenael

  “I didn’t steal the goddam horse!” Sun Wolf wrenched angrily at the manacles the High Sheriff of Zeddyam had clamped on his wrists at the tavern, and wondered why, in three years of study in the volumes of magic painstakingly collected (wherever the now-defunct Wizard King hadn’t destroyed them), he still hadn’t come across a spell to make locks fall apart.

  Didn’t any of those goddam sorcerers in ages past ever get busted for anything?

  Bunch of sissies…

  As he struggled – more from indignation than from any thought that he could actually break free of the four men poking swords in his ribs – he took note of the town donjon to which they were hustling him. Though built of stone it didn’t look like much of a problem – not if the locks on its doors were anything like the quality of the Sheriff’s unimpressive posse. Its walls had clearly not been repaired in years – everything in this part of the Thanelands had a dilapidated air, owing to its conquest a century ago by the aforesaid Wizard-King – and Zeddyam had not been one of the Wizard-King’s strongholds. The stone well that served the little stronghold stood on a crumbling platform of bricks a dozen yards outside its gate, presumably for the greater convenience of the town (And won’t THAT help them during a siege…). The gate into the courtyard looked as if it had been standing open for decades, and as they passed inside, Sun Wolf’s single eye picked out three windows on the ground floor and five on the upper. Bars, but rusted…

  Someone behind him whipped a blindfold over his eyes, and the Wolf restrained himself from jabbing the man with an elbow and tripping him. He’d fought groups of men when he had to, back in his days as a mercenary, and the main thing he’d learned from those experiences had been to pick his battles. Why risk getting yourself knocked unconscious – or killed, if one of those yobbos was feeling manly – if by waiting you could escape later? Getting out of a cell without a concussion was always easier than with one…

  And Starhawk, who’d been over at the tavern’s tap-window getting a couple of mugs of ale when the High Sheriff had come in with his accusations and his posse and his motherless manacles, had made herself scarce rather than get into a fight with the whole tavern.

  She’d be following them.

  “Paltho Shen saw you,” said the High Sheriff’s voice behind him, treble and a little raspy, like a rusty saw.

  “Paltho Shen’s a frakking liar, then, and so are you—“

  Someone poked him hard with what felt like a sword-hilt, and said, “Paltho Shen is a scholar and a healer of great renown!”

  Crap.

  Sun Wolf knew better than to continue the argument. He knew why he’d been arrested, and knew it had nothing to do with Paltho Shen’s motherless horse.

  They took the manacles off him before they fettered him to the wall, and he could, he supposed – had he felt in any real danger – have made a break for it then. But he was still blindfolded, and whipping the scarf off his eyes might have given one of them time to stick a swordblade between his ribs. He was fairly certain of where the door was and where the four men around him were in the room, but the timing on an attack would be very tight, and any of those four might be quicker than he suspected. Safer to wait. They didn’t remove the blindfold until they’d locked the wrist-fetters on – rusted almost through, by the feel of them on his skin – and then the chains were almost long enough for him to reach the window. It was head-high and, as he’d guessed, overlooked the courtyard: one flight of steps – wooden, creaking, and mended.

  “Do I get a trial?” he asked, looking from the paunchy, square-faced High Sheriff to his henchmen. “Or do you just kill strangers in Zeddyam on the word of a citizen?”

  The Sheriff reddened, and the shortest (and oldest, by his wrinkles) of the henchmen snapped, “The laws of our commune are just!” His indignation clearly cut off the Sheriff’s retort, which the Wolf guessed was more along the lines of how the word of a citizen – and a scholar and healer of great renown at that – would be more than sufficient to hang the likes of him.

  The broad-shouldered young man whose voice had earlier defended Paltho Shen (May lice breed in his armpits…) said, “Our healer set forth this morning, for Springhallow, where there is sickness – afoot, thanks to you. He’ll not return for a three-night.”

  “And I can tell you now it’ll go easier with you,” growled the Sheriff, “if you tell us where the horse is.”

  “I don’t know a pox-festering thing about any motherless horse,” returned Sun Wolf patiently.

  “He saw you,” said the young man, as if no one had ever told him a lie in his life.

  And the High Sheriff, annoyed with the entire conversation, stepped close to Sun Wolf and struck him across the face.

  Sun Wolf couldn’t help it. The man was in range and left his groin wide open and though years as a mercenary captain had drummed in Don’t do anything stupid while you’re chained to a wall, enough was enough. Events unfolded fairly inevitably after that and by the time Starhawk finally got there – late that night, with a horn dark-lantern in one hand, her sword in the other and the fetter-keys stuck in her belt – the Wolf’s head had cleared, his bruises had stiffened, and the blood on his face and in his hair had dried.

  “You cut their throats?” he grumbled, as the Hawk unlocked the manacles.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Just locked them in one of the downstairs cells. God’s grandmother, Chief,” she added, holding up the lantern to take a better look at him. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know they were going to—”

  “They weren’t. My fault.” When Young-And-Trusting and Old Wrinkly had carried the sobbing High Sheriff out of the cell, the third henchman – the fat pig-eyed man who’d done most of the beating – had taken away the water-pitcher; something Sun Wolf had been too battered to notice at the time, though for the remainder of the afternoon he’d been consumed with thirst. Another reason not to do anything stupid while chained to a wall… “They take the saddle-bags?”

  “Wrinkle-Puss came back for them,” said the Hawk, as they passed through the watch-room downstairs. In the holding-cell – a sort of barred niche off the larger chamber which held the Sheriff’s desk and a worktable – the Sheriff and his three henchmen slumbered uneasily in a pile. The barred door was locked and the sleepers were barefoot and trouserless. An unnecessary precaution, reflected the Wolf. When Starhawk put someone to sleep, they generally stayed asleep. “Don’t touch the ale,” she warned, when he moved toward the boiled-leather pitcher on the worktable. “The water’s all right.”

  She set her lantern on the work-table and dunked a rag in the big pottery jar in another corner as Sun Wolf went to his saddlebags, dumped near the courtyard door. A glance told him they’d been rifled. A second glance confirmed his suspicions about who’d accused him of horse-thieving and why. “Anybody go into the inn just after they hauled me out?”

  Her fine, pale brows twitched together. A tall woman, slim-built but with arms muscled like a man’s from her years as the second-in-command of his mercenary troop, it wasn’t often she looked indecisive. “Somebody did,” sh
e said at length. “I—It’s weird, Chief, I can’t remember what they looked like.”

  Sun Wolf used an expression that would have got him sent straight to Hell by the Triple God, had he believed in such an entity. “Looks like we got competition,” he said, mopping the blood from his face and checking to make sure no teeth had been loosened by Pig-Face’s beating. “Let’s get the horses and get the hell out of town.”

  Three years previously, when the Citadel of the Wizard-King Altiokis had been blown to Kingdom Come, Sun Wolf and Starhawk had been told in no uncertain terms never to set foot again in the Realm of Mandrigyn, largest and wealthiest of the Thanelands and the territory on which the Citadel had stood. In the century and a half that the Wizard-King had dominated the whole of the Middle Realms, that dark sorcerer had not only systematically slaughtered any mages who might have opposed him – or who might have taught others to develop the skills to oppose him – but he had collected every book of magic that he could find.

  Most of these he had burned. Random fragments were all that remained, imperfectly copied and half-rotted-away from long hiding in wells and cellars and rafters. Those mageborn during Altiokis’ reign, or the few mages who’d managed to evade his notice, were left without training or any means to acquire it. In many cases, those who’d hidden the books had died without telling anyone where they might be found. Sun Wolf, whose magic had blossomed after twenty years of sacking cities and leading a mercenary army in battle, daily cursed Altiokis, as he sought for instruction of any kind in the use of abilities which terrified him.

  And lately, as he’d clumsily experimented with spells pieced together from those books which came his way – as he’d tried to figure out the few cantrips and piesog he managed to learn from other mageborn mostly as ignorant as he – his mind had returned to the Citadel of Altiokis. To the man himself, greedy and dangerous and three-parts-mad when Sun Wolf had finally met him.

  WOULD he have destroyed all of those books?

  Sun Wolf’s recollection of the wizard’s citadel included, not only the frightful thing which teemed in the blackness of its dungeons, but glimpses of chambers, deep in the vaults, stuffed with treasure and tribute, loot that latterly Altiokis had simply been too careless or too distracted to examine.

  He has to have had books somewhere.

  “You blew up the Citadel,” Starhawk had pointed out to him, when he brought up the subject to her. “I saw the ruins, Chief. There was nothing there but a crater.”

  “You know as well as I do, nobody founds a fortress on a rock like that without digging vaults as deep as they can,” he’d returned. “Hell, the mines under the place went for miles. They said in Mandrigyn that the upper levels of the mines included locked rooms, barred gates…”

  “And Sheera of Mandrigyn, and the City Assembly, said they’d chain you under the tide-line and let you be eaten by crabs, if you ever came back.”

  Sun Wolf had expressed himself on the subject of what the Lady Sheera and the City Assembly of Mandrigyn could do with their crabs.

  But the thought of those books – those vaults – the dark passageways of the mines through which he’d been dragged in chains to meet the Wizard-King – would not leave him. And when, two months ago, one of his former mercenary troop had ridden out to his hermitage in the Silver Hills with a half-dozen pages of a grimoire he’d acquired in a dice-game (“We thought this looked like some of that magic shit you’re interested in these days, Chief…”), he had made up his mind.

  “That’s the gate.” He’d tapped the faded drawing on one of the pages with his sword-callused forefinger. “The gate from the Mines into the Citadel.”

  Moggin – the gray-haired scholar who shared their hermitage and looked after the cows when they were gone – looked doubtful, but Starhawk had nodded. If there was one thing Sun Wolf had become an expert on, during his years as a mercenary captain, it was gates.

  “Gateway of the Vaults of Raccen Tower,” Moggin read, over the Wolf’s shoulder. The language of the pages was incomprehensible – even the alphabet unfamiliar.

  “Would that be Racken Scrag?” surmised the Hawk, gray glance moving from Sun Wolf to Moggin to the warrior who’d brought it, who was also studying the text with interest. “Where’d you get this, Dogbreath?”

  “A peddler from Laedden who was passing through Wrynde.” The dark, wiry man shrugged. “After he’d diced with Penpusher this was pretty much all he had left. Penpusher got bottle of brandy and six pretty good arrowheads off him, and said we should send this on to you. Racken Scrag like Altiokis’ citadel at Racken Scrag?” Even though the Wizard-King was dead and his fortress a hole in the side of the mountain, Dogbreath still sounded wary.

  “The warding-spells of Tremoch,” read Moggin, a slight frown between his brows. “Tremoch was the court mage of Delsheb, the Thane who originally built that fortress in the great days of the Megantic Empire. Those are the old runes of Mandres, that used to be used all over the Thanelands—”

  “Can you translate?” the Wolf had asked. “We passed that gate in the mines, I know we did, going up to the Citadel. It was guarded then, but I’m guessing there’s nobody watching it now. Zeddyam’s on that side of the mountain now,” he’d added, seeing Starhawk open her lips to remind him about the City Assembly of Mandrigyn and the promise of watery and crabby doom. “They broke away from Mandrigyn last year and as far as I know, Mandrigyn hasn’t been able to take ‘em back.”

  “Not as of Yule,” affirmed Dogbreath. “We got feelers from both sides for an attack but neither of ‘em were offering enough to pay for fodder for the horses, so it didn’t sound like they were serious about a war yet.”

  Sun Wolf had folded the fragile, mold-spotted pages together, stroking them with the backs of his fingers, like a beloved woman’s breast. “So there’s nothing to stop us,” he’d said softly, “from getting in.”

  The manuscript in its leather wrappings was what was missing from his saddlebag.

  “Pox rot the hair off Paltho Shen’s nards,” said Sun Wolf, as he and Starhawk tied their horses in a laurel-hell that had grown up just downhill from the slave-barracks that had served Altiokis’ silver-mine, deep beneath the towering peak called Grimscarp.

  He slipped a long iron pry-bar from a spear-holster beside the saddle, and Starhawk hooked a lantern to the back of her baldric. The explosion which had gutted the citadel above had unleashed an avalanche, which had in its turn half-buried this ugly complex of dormitories, jails, slag-heaps and stamping-mills in which the men of half the Thanelands had been compelled to work. In the wet climate of the Megantic coastlands, the woods had re-taken the area fast. Sun Wolf and Starhawk climbed through thick underbrush of spiny juniper and rabbitbush, but saplings of oak and beech were everywhere, re-settling where the slaves of the Wizard-King had stripped the mountainside to fuel the Citadel’s fires.

  Riding up from Zeddyam through the night, the Wolf had heard the voices of his namesake in the distance, the smaller mountain wolves of these cold eastern lands, and now and then the eerie wail of the kildeer.

  The commune and city fathers of Zeddyam might claim these lands, he reflected, but almost certainly they lacked the manpower to hold them. If the forces of Mandrigyn marched in, he suspected, the story would be the same.

  Or maybe it was just that nobody was willing to get that close to the Wizard-King’s gutted domain.

  Beyond the trees, the red-streaked gray cliff-face of the mine was just visible against the gray sky of morning. Sun Wolf remembered how steep the road got, that last half-mile from the mine buildings to the tunnel itself, a black maw in the mountain, like the gate of a city. Here and there in the trees he could still see where the platforms of the guards had overlooked the way.

  “Little short guy?” The Hawk gestured an estimate of his height. “Nose like a rutabaga? Looks like he’s about a hundred and fifty years old?”

  “Never seen him,” said the Wolf. “That the guy who sneaked into the Inn after I g
ot dragged out of there?”

  “I don’t…” She hesitated. “It’s like a dreamed I saw him, but every time I try to remember what the guy looked like, I start thinking about something else.”

  “He’s good if he can make that spell work,” grumbled the Wolf. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for a year. Renowned scholar and healer, they called him – I wonder when he came to town? He wouldn’t have dared live this close when Altiokis was still alive. He’s been camped out in Zeddyam, waiting his chance to get into the Citadel. Waiting for some other wizard to come along, who knew how to open the gates into its vaults.”

  “If he’s that good,” pointed out the Hawk, “why swipe your book?”

  “Because he didn’t know that particular spell.” Sun Wolf shrugged. “The spell about, You didn’t see me and I wasn’t here… I found it written in one of those old grimoires Kaletha of Wenshar had. I copied it down, but she couldn’t make it work, either. So either it was written wrong, or there’s some component of it that didn’t get written – that was passed on from master to pupil verbally, or that had to be—“

  The words froze on his lips and he saw Starhawk, too, stop in her tracks. She smells it as well.

  Blood. A lot of it.

  The guttural croaking of ravens ahead.

  He felt as if every hair on his body prickled up like a dog’s.

  Without a word exchanged, the two mercenaries ghosted from the ruined trackway itself, and into the trees.

  Long silence, save for the quarreling of the carrion-birds. But near them in the tangle of underbrush, a rock-dove warbled its claim on its territory; farther off, another answered from the trees.

  Whatever the danger is, it’s gone…

  He put out his hand, moved aside the branches that clustered around the ruin of stones where they crouched. Carefully, because these mountains, these woods, were infested with spiders the size of a child’s hand…