Gwenael Page 2

  Two horses – or what was left of them – lay just in front of the mouth of the mine-tunnel, dotted all over with huge, bickering birds. Sun Wolf tried to think what it was that would have killed them: Wolf-pack?

  Wolves would have remained to feast.

  Puma as well.

  The ravens hissed and swore at him as he stepped out of the thickets, drawn sword in his hand. The Hawk remained a few yards behind him, ready also but far enough off to divide an attack. He heard her whisper, “What the…?” as she got near enough to see what he saw, on the ground muddy with blood and scored with the frantic hoof-prints of a riding-horse and a pack-animal fighting for their lives.

  The Wolf said, “No prints,” and retreated, soundlessly, to Starhawk’s side. “Guess Moggie was right.” Together they faded back into the undergrowth that masked what had been a guardhouse wall.

  He dug into the pouch at his belt, and produced a scrap of wood – a leftover fragment from repairs last month on the hermitage chicken-coop – on which a simple design was drawn, three interlocking triangles with a hand extending from them, and an eye in the fingers of the hand. Starhawk produced not only the small bag of silver dust that she had carried some two hundred miles from the Badlands, but the one that the High Sheriff of Zeddyam had taken from Sun Wolf the previous afternoon as well. A fountain-house, made for the use of the guards, was near-by – the Wolf could hear the soft bubble of the spring – and in a broken dipper he found beside it, he mixed the silver dust, iron dust which he’d also carried, and some of his blood and the Hawk’s. The spell that Moggin had interpreted from a scrap of book found last winter in [ ] had simply said, “Blood,” in its account of a protection-spell, but Sun Wolf wasn’t about to take any from the dead horses.

  “God’s granny might know what killed them,” he muttered, as he polished up the fragment of steel mirror in which he semi-habitually shaved. “But I don’t, and I’m not gonna take chances. It doesn’t say how much blood, either.”

  “Yeah, and I’d feel better if I knew Moggin’s translation of the spell was right.” Starhawk then remained silent while the Wolf drew the triangles, the hand, the eye on her face. “If it wasn’t to protect against Altiokis’ magic after all, we’re both in trouble.”

  “We’ve both been in trouble since we came into the Thanelands,” muttered Sun Wolf. “Just hold that mirror steady.”

  The Wolf kindled Starhawk’s lantern, and slipped its slide all the way down as they approached the tunnel mouth again, making a wide circuit around the dead horses. Starhawk drew her sword, and with her left hand gripped the back of Sun Wolf’s belt. It occurred to him how deep was her trust in his mageborn ability to see in darkness. He himself couldn’t think of a single person behind whom he’d walk blind into ruins where a dead wizard’s spells – or a live and hostile semi-wizard – moved at large.

  Except, he reflected, Starhawk…

  The main passageway through the old silver-mine was much as he remembered it. He’d been half-starved, physically battered, and exhausted from a two-day walk up the mountain from Mandrigyn when he’d been through here last – not to mention scared out of his mind at the prospect of confronting the Wizard-King. But even as he’d recognized the drawing of the gate, he recognized the way: he’d first gone to war with his father’s tribe when he was eleven, and it was like breathing to him, to note the approaches and defenses of any place, great or small. The guards, he recalled, had worn the sigil of the interlocking triangles marked on their faces.

  The paste of blood and silver itched his skin. Like Starhawk, he hoped Moggin had translated the words of the spell correctly.

  He could smell the old magics in the darkness. The physical traps – the blades that sliced from the walls, the giant rolling boulders, the floors that dropped away into pits of spikes – had all been sprung when Altiokis’ citadel above had blown up, but the more subtle dangers whispered around every corner. He caught the smell of demons – like blood thrown onto heated iron. Heard things that twittered like bats in the dark.

  Maybe they were only bats.

  When they reached the Citadel gate it stood open. He remembered the guard-room beyond, and that they’d taken the middle of the three doors leading from it, up to the Citadel itself. Somewhere in the blackness beyond those broken doors, he heard what sounded like dogs baying. A pack in full cry, echoing far away.

  “What the hell is that?” Starhawk whispered. “Nobody’s been in this place for years. Those are dogs, not wolves—“

  “The Invisible Dogs,” he whispered back. “Altiokis conjured them against his enemies.”

  “And I suppose,” returned the Hawk, “since you killed him, that means you?”

  The Wolf shifted his sword in his right hand, his grip on the pry-bar in his left. “Altiokis thought a lot of people were his enemies. Anyone who dared interfere with his domination, or who he thought might interfere. But yeah,” he sighed. “Right now, I’m guessing that means me.”

  “Will the face-paint help?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  Coming up through the mines, Sun Wolf had seen, everywhere in the tunnel, the bones of the Wizard-King’s guards, scattered where later scavengers – foxes, wolves, weasels – had left them. They were thicker in the guard-room, thicker still in the tunnel beyond, mixed with the bones of the miners slain in the fighting. He’d known mercs who had only patchy recollection of the actual fighting, after battles – there were one or two fights he himself had come through without much memory of them, if he’d taken a head-wound.

  The horrors, the nearly-unbearable agony, of coming through that maelstrom of pain and darkness, the loss of his eye and the savage blossoming of the magic within his flesh and soul – all those were clear as crystal in his memory. He thrust them resolutely aside now, knowing that if he let himself feel those things again he’d be useless for whatever might lie ahead. But he was sweating, as he searched the debris on the floor for Paltho Shen’s shuffling tracks; then searched his own mind – carefully – for what he could remember seeing in the Citadel in its heyday.

  Cross-corridors. Doors, broken or blown open by the explosion that had ripped apart the whole of the stronghold that stood above the ground. As they ascended, dim light filtered down from ripped vaulting, shattered roof-tiles above.

  The smell of demons. Far off, the baying of the Invisible Dogs.

  Store-rooms filled with chests. Though Paltho Shen’s tracks went past their doors, Sun Wolf turned aside, marked the boxes with a standard counter-spell (praying Moggin had translated it properly, and that the damn thing would work against Altiokis’ magic) before breaking open the rusted locks. (Not that the ancestors he prayed to had had anything but contempt for spells and damn little regard for wizards…)

  The chests were crammed with gold. Sacks of it, packed in around tangled balls of pearls, bags of jewels, raw or polished or facet-cut in the fashion of the Middle Kingdoms. Both he and the Hawk knew better than to touch so much as a copper spangle…

  “He’s got to have known what was here.” Starhawk wiped spider-web off her fingers – the vaults were foul with them. “If he didn’t come in to check it out.”

  “If I was book-hunting in a place like this,” replied the Wolf, “I’d wait til I found what I was looking for, then fill my pockets on the way back. Gold is heavy. And if you can’t smell the curses that lie on these chests, I can.”

  “Wonder how many guards got themselves sizzled for pilfering?”

  “I’d say,” he murmured, retreating to the corridor and picking up the scuffed trail again, “not more than one.”

  Other treasure-rooms. Moldering bales of Mandrigyn silks, broken casks that spilled priceless spices, desiccated and rotted with time. In his later years, when the Wizard-King’s mind had begun to slip, he had grown more greedy, piling up treasure and tribute almost at random. Only a few of the objects Sun Wolf saw in those broken chambers related to the working of magic: shells, crystals, dragon-
bone. Pearls that had been formed in certain specific shapes. Vials of the blood of children and rare beasts: were-wolves, swan-maidens, unicorns, mermaids. Skulls of creatures the Wolf did not recognize, all draped over with the webs of the huge forest spiders. He felt the magic in those vials and jars, but like the gold, he dared not touch them.

  He wondered if books survived, in other chambers in the vaults, that provided words and signs to unlock the sticky maledictions that clung to the things like cobweb.

  “He’d have to have written down the counterspells, wouldn’t he, Chief?” Starhawk’s voice was scarcely louder than the soundless grind of their feet on the dust and debris that covered everything. “If, as you say, his mind was eroding from contact with that – that thing in the vaults that he drew his power from?”

  “Yeah, and with our luck he kept it in his pocket.”

  Altiokis had been nearly on top of the blasting-powder when the Wolf had touched it off.

  “Well,” said the Hawk, “frak.” She turned her head sharply, and Sun Wolf froze into stillness, listening too. Thinking, too, that he’d heard something…

  At his signal they moved on, listening behind them, around them. They’d found scat in the mines among the scattered bones: foxes and wolves, and the small red-brown bears of these eastern mountains. There was nothing here, save bats in the lower vaults, and, among the broken archways far overhead, birds, and the ever-present spiders.

  Another floor-trap. The shock-wave of the Citadel’s destruction had dropped the two halves of the floor down, just beyond a junction, revealing, thirty feet below, the dull glint of close-set spikes. But the framework to which the trap-doors were hinged remained along the walls, barely a palms-breadth wide. Not enough to walk on, but a light rope had been tied to the handle of a broken door a short way down the corridor to the right, and hung in a long swag down against the dangling face of the trap-door, then up again and running on into darkness on the other side.

  “Looks like he put his weight on the rope,” judged the Wolf after a moment, “and hung on by his hands on the ledge. Look where the debris has been swept off it, all the way along.”

  “There another way around?” Starhawk looked up and down the darkness of the passageways that stretched to the right and left of the junction.

  “We don’t know where he’s headed.” Sun Wolf walked a little way to the right, and to the left, down the lightless cross-passage, and saw no disturbance of the thick layer of grit and dust. “Or what kind of map he’s got. He went that way—“ He nodded down the straight-ahead corridor, across the ten yards or so of trap, “—so it’s pretty clear he didn’t think so.”

  Starhawk said again, “Frak. You want to go first, or shall I?”

  His instinct was to curse, as foully as he knew how, but a the lifetime he’d spent commanding troops and learning oaths had also taught him silence, and he stood for a time, listening to the black stillness. Faint light, greenish with overgrowth far above, illuminated the trap, leaving the corridor behind it – and the corridor behind them – in abyssal night.

  Night and silence. Yet his whole body prickled with the nearness of danger.

  He sheathed his sword. “I’ll go first.” He handed her the pry-bar, which she hooked to the back of her baldric. Squatted down, pulled off his boots – these he hung around his neck with one of the laces of his doublet – and tested the strength of the rope. Then, bare feet shrinking a little from the rough-twisted hemp, he slid onto the spider-like bridge, gripping the ledge above him as he edged his way across. He moved as quickly as he dared, but with a careful deliberation: he’d done worse things, and for stupider reasons. All I’ll need is for Paltho Shen to come back out this way and cut the rope when I’m halfway across…

  Behind him he heard the unmistakable twang of a bow-string, the soft, solid thunk of an arrow hitting flesh, and Starhawk’s stifled cry. He was twenty feet out on the rope, looked back at the sound of booted feet running – Damn it damn it damn it…

  It was young Mr. Young-And-Trusting from the High Sheriff’s posse. He had a short bow in one hand, arrows on his back (Damn it damn it…) and what looked an awful lot like a clay fire-grenade in the other (May your frakking ancestors rot in the frakking Cold Hells forever…).

  And yes, it was a pox-festering frakking motherless fire-grenade that burst into flames when he hurled it against the desiccated hardwood of the hinged flooring against which Sun Wolf’s body was pressed. And he’d have done better, thought the Wolf, to have made sure of Starhawk first before doing anything else, because in the next second she launched herself out of the side-corridor into which the force of the arrow had obviously knocked her – the arrow still sticking out of her side – and the young man had barely time to leap back to avoid being skewered on her sword.

  He dropped his bow and ran. Even with an arrow in Starhawk’s ribs, that was always the best course in dealing with her in a bad mood.

  Flames raced across the dry wood, blazed down the rope on which he stood.

  He yelled, “Cut the rope!” which she was already taking out her knife to do – the fire was inches from his bare feet and that on the wood spreading more slowly. He worked his fingers into the narrow crevice of the trap’s hinge, pressed himself to the wood as the burning rope dropped away under him and he was hanging by his arms only. When he reached the far side of the pit the rope, where it hung over the edge, still burned, but he was able to kick it out of the way and scramble up – that end was tied to the frame of another door about twenty feet down the passageway, and he beat out the flame before it consumed the last fifteen feet or so. Returning to the pit, he saw that the Hawk, may her ancestors swill wine in Heaven, had already gone back and untied the twenty feet that were intact and unburned on her end.

  She was sitting with her back against the corner of the wall, her head leaned back on the stonework.

  “You all right?” he called across the pit.

  “Go to Hell,” she called back. The arrow was still in her side, high up, and awkwardly placed just below her shoulder. Lodged on a rib, he thought, or maybe on the shoulder-blade.

  “Can you pry off the burned flooring of the trap?” The flames had consumed much of the dry planking, showing the stouter framework beneath that held up the ledge.

  “Go to Hell,” she said again, and got painfully to her feet. “And take Paltho Shen with you.” Slowly, she pulled off her boots, slung them around her neck with a doublet-lace, and with painful slowness, edged down onto the framework revealed by the burned-away face of the trap. Clinging to the criss-cross of beams, she pushed and pried the charred and weakened wood away, so that it fell on top of the spikes. Gingerly, she let herself down, crawled across below the section of framework where flames still flickered, to where Sun Wolf let down his end of the rope.

  She was white and sweating with pain and shock by the time he hauled her up. “Mother pus-bucket that hurts,” she added, as he stripped off her doublet, pulled down her shirt and had a look at the wound.

  “Damn poozley birding-arrow.” He summoned fire to cleanse the blade of his knife, and while it cooled handed her his flask of rum. Starhawk said what she thought about young Mr. Young-And-Trusting, as the Wolf sponged the blood from her shoulder, then very gently winkled out the thin barbs of the arrow from the flesh. He closed his eyes, muttered every healing-spell he knew, and tied the wound up with the torn-out sleeves of his own shirt. “Can you walk?”

  She took long gulps from her water-bottle, then another quick jolt from his rum. “If walking will get me close to Paltho Shen,” she said grimly, “you bet.”

  But Sun Wolf had to support her by the time they reached the chamber where Altiokis had hidden his books, and it was clear from the dust-free rectangles on the broken-down shelves, the back-and-forth scuffing of tracks on the floor, that they were far too late. After cursing the ‘scholar and healer of great renown’ with everything from mange to smallpox, Sun Wolf followed the tracks to another small door – “So
there is another way through…” – which led into a watch-room, black as the pits of Hell and filled with the newly-burned debris of what must have been a wall of spiderwebs.

  A door opened onto another pit – no trap-door, this time, but a retractable bridge that had been broken off in the destruction of the Citadel. A rope dangled forty feet to dark water below. Somewhere behind them in the mazes of the old fortress’s vaults, the Wolf could hear the baying of the Invisible Dogs.

  “Anything down there?” Starhawk’s voice was a gasp of exhaustion. The wall at the other side of the pit had half-caved-in; peering through the darkness, the Wolf could see it was possible to scramble out that way, and by the water still gleaming on the stones, that was indeed how Paltho Shen had made his exit.

  “Probably was at one time.” Sun Wolf knotted the salvaged rope-ends together, added his swordbelt, the Hawk’s swordbelt, and the Hawk’s baldric – he wasn’t about to trust his weight on any rope that his rival had touched. “You wait here.” The water was only thigh-deep and at the sides of the pit he could see the tops of submerged archways: serpents? Crocodiles? The nine-foot carnivorous gar-fish that haunted the marshes below Mandrigyn, that could take off a man’s arm with a single snap? Sword in hand, he crossed to the trail up, then crossed back, and re-climbed his own improvised rope.

  He found Starhawk lying on the stone floor, and though she opened her eyes and tried to get to her feet, and under the dark design of protective triangles, her face was pallid with shock, pain, and fatigue. It wasn’t until he’d carried her through the Citadel vaults, and back down the mine-tunnel, to the overgrown ruins of the miners’ barracks, that she spoke – a whispered curse upon the discovery that Paltho Shen (and to judge from the tracks young Mr. Young-and-Trusting) had stolen their horses. “If the bastard tries to ride Widowmaker,” she added, “he’s gonna get what he deserves.”