Gwenael

By

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

Copyright 2018 Barbara Hambly

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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,” she 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 got 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…

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.”

It was barely past noon, but Sun Wolf decided they’d had enough excitement for the day. He wrapped Starhawk in his own doublet and covered her with laurel-branches and last autumn’s fallen leaves to keep her warm – her flesh was now like ice – and built a fire; fought a duel with about fifty ravens for a pound or two of slightly stale horse-flesh; and was gratified to discover that in the excitement of their flight, Paltho Shen and his companion had forgotten to salvage their own saddlebags containing bread, cheese, and bottles of ginger-water and wine.

Starhawk fell asleep shortly after that. The Wolf – feeling much better after a meal – spent a little time trying to lay a Summoning spell at a distance on his horse Widowmaker (not that that bloody-minded piece of Original Sin had ever paid any attention to any spell of the Wolf’s before this) and on Starhawk’s gelding Coal. He had no idea if they worked or not. By nightfall, though the Hawk did not wake, Sun Wolf was glad to see that she breathed more easily, and a little of the color had returned to her porcelain-fine skin.

The night was clammy and cold, and the blood that blotted the saddle-cloths salvaged from the dead horses brought foxes sniffing constantly in the rabbit-brush tangles around the camp, but Sun Wolf didn’t care. He tended the fire, and watched the darkness, and listened to the far-off baying of the Invisible Dogs.

Widowmaker showed up at first light. The big gelding still wore saddle and bridle – and Sun Wolf’s saddle-bags containing more bread and cheese (Whichever of my ancestors is responsible for this, I owe you a goat…) – and had the grudging air of one who returns because he wanted to, not because of any two-bit spell. He tried to bite Sun Wolf as the Wolf unsaddled him.

“At least we’ve got a way to get back to Zeddyam… if that’s where we want to go,” he said, when Starhawk opened her eyes. “I doubt the High Sheriff’s out looking for us. We could probably get pretty close to town without being seen.”

“You think it’s worth it, Chief?”

“I think it’s worth a try.” Sun Wolf dug in his saddlebag for the medicines – and bandages – that he carried, and wondered if Paltho Shen was sneaky enough to have anticipated this and poisoned the tinctures. For a man he’d never actually seen, he was coming to have a lively hatred for that scholar and healer of great renown.

Wonder if there’s some kind of spell I can put on Young-and-Trusting so he’ll never get laid again?

“One of those books may contain counterspells that would let me take the ingredients we saw in Altiokis’ treasure-room,” he went on after a moment. “The dragonbone, the twisted pearls, the silver wire – not to mention that frakking shitload of treasure.”

“And they may contain spells that would warn Shen of our coming from five miles off,” Starhawk reminded him, “and blow us out of our saddles before we even see him. That’s the first thing I’d look up when I got home.”

“Pox blister frakking Shen and all his motherless ancestors.” Sun Wolf sniffed at the little bottle of tincture again. “You be all right here by yourself for an hour? I saw black willow down the mountain a ways…”

“That’ll be Cygnet Pond,” said Starhawk in a faint voice. “The tavern-keeper told me. There’s wound-wort there, too.”

She frowned, closed her eyes again, putting aside the pain with the stoicism of practice. “She said swan-maidens used to dance there, before Altiokis started hunting them. Said they’ve been seen there again… A girl was taken, she said, only last year. Gwenael, the daughter of the miller. They tempt men into dancing with them, and drown them.”

“Great,” sighed the Wolf. “I’ll take some dry bread to throw to them. I’ll be fine.”

*

Moving through the woods towards the little pond he’d glimpsed, to the west of the road, he listened, for other than the cries of the ravens over the carcasses of the two horses, the woods were more silent than they should have been at this time of year. There was something amiss, something deadly dangerous. He had felt it in the darkness last night. Felt it now, even with the gray light broadening through the trees. A prickling in his skin. A sense that there was something going on – far-off, he thought. And in the direction of town.

He was conscious that these woods had never recovered from the evil of the Wizard-King. In his marrow-bones, he knew that he and the Hawk had been lucky to get out of the tunnels alive.

As he gently dug wound-wort from the marshy borders of Cygnet Pond, he heard above him the great wimmering of pale wings, and looking up, saw the swans descending. Despite Starhawk’s warning, his heart was still moved by the sight of them, like snowy ghosts in the early light. From childhood he had been fascinated by the birds, though after his mother had beaten him for protesting when his father had killed one for dinner, he’d kept his mouth shut about it, as about many other things. In the bitter lands of the north, food was food.

In some of the wasteland tribes, he recalled, it was believed that the souls of the women ancestors – disdaining the drunken Heavenly feasts of their spouses – lived on as swans. Were they, as Starhawk had heard rumored, coming back to these lands again, now that the Wizard-King was gone? He recalled those little flasks of blood, in the storage-vaults of the Citadel.

In many ways, he thought as he made his way back through the spider-haunted woods, the Hawk reminded him of a swan, in her pale aloofness. Like a swan, she was beautiful as ivory and bone, and like a swan, she was loyal unto death.

And like a swan, she was capable of breaking your damn arm if you got too close.

Returning, he dressed her wounds, and slept; made another meal off horse-meat, bread, and cheese, and kept watch over Starhawk as she slept again, deeply and long. Indeed for that day, and the night that followed, they kept to the shelter of the ruins, the Wolf alert always to the threat of the too-silent woods. It was late the following afternoon, and Starhawk was up and about, when the Wolf waked from light sleep at the sound of hooves on the road, at almost the same moment that the Hawk knelt at his side, and touched his sleeve.

Neither said a word. The Hawk melted quietly into the tangles of laurel that surrounded the camp.

It was Young-and-Trusting, riding a nervous chestnut gelding, and leading Starhawk’s horse Coal. He looked haggard, shaky, and pale as a sick man, a bandage wrapped round his right arm.

Dismounting, he held up his hands, to show them empty.

“My lord,” he said.

Sun Wolf replied, in his gravelly voice, “So who’s the horse-thief now?”

“My lord,” whispered the young man, his dark eyes nearly frantic, “forgive us. All of—“ He strayed within range of where Widowmaker was tied, and the horse lashed out at him with a back hoof.

The young man leaped out of the way, shaking all over, then turned back to Sun Wolf. “All of us. Please. We need your help—“

“I thought you had a scholar and healer of great renown in town.” Sun Wolf folded his heavy arms, his single eye glittering yellow beneath the long tufts of red-gold brow. “One who’s just acquired a shitload of magic books, if I remember right.”

“Please,” begged the young man, shaking his head as if tormented by flies. “Please, we are desperate—“

“You mean,” asked Sun Wolf, “desperate like a man standing on a burning rope above a pit of spikes… that kind of desperate? Or desperate like somebody who’s been shot from ambush in the middle of a labyrinth of full of demons? Desperate like that?”

Starhawk stepped from the laurel thicket which had hidden her, asked, “What’s the problem?”

“The dogs,” he whispered, looking from her to the Wolf, and back again. “The Invisible Dogs.”

*

“We heard them around the town in the darkness,” said Tiogh – which was Young-and-Trusting’s actual name – “on the night we returned.” He dodged another kick from Widowmaker, and helped Sun Wolf sling the last of the re-filled water-bottles onto Coal’s saddle. “Master Shen said it was only a matter of finding the Fetch-Ward, which would be, he said, in the Wizard-King’s Great Grimoire, the Black Book of Grimscarp—“

“Which was one of the books you got from the Citadel?” The Wolf stood beside Starhawk as she mounted, pretending that one of the knots holding the saddlebags was poorly tied. She’d have kicked him twenty feet if she’d thought he was lingering to help her if she needed it.

“Yes, Lord Wizard. I mean, I’m sure it is – but the thing is, though everybody had heard of it, nobody really… really knew what it looked like. There were four of the books bound in black, and the largest of them was bound in red, with steel clasps. And the only spell that related to the Dogs – the Ghast-Hounds, is what it called them – isn’t clear. There are words – signs – that need to be written ‘in the blood,’ it says, but it doesn’t say the blood of what.”

He swung into the saddle, a young and comely boy, the Wolf thought – probably the dream of every maiden for miles around. His smooth, light-brown hair was cut short, in the fashion of artisans through most of the Thanelands, and his brown eyes were grave and earnest and kind. Right hand slightly larger than his left, with the calluses on thumb and index finger left by a carpenter’s tools. Sawdust flecked his boots.

“It killed Enna Thatcher,” the young man went on, as they turned their horses’ heads to the trail leading down toward Zeddyam. “Her father had barricaded the house – everyone had, when the baying came down into the streets. Dust stirred up around them, but within the dust there was nothing. I looked out my master’s window, saw the gleam of their eyes in the darkness. Master Thatcher swears his house was locked up tight, but he heard them, within his house, he says, baying and snarling. Enna and her sisters slept at the back of the house, the noise was in the – the hallway, between their room and where Master and Mistress Thatcher were in the kitchen. Then they heard the girls screaming…”

He turned his face aside.

“And what was Shen doing while all this was going on?”

“Searching in the books for the Fetch-Ward. He says the Ghast-Hounds can’t be the same thing—“

“What the hell does he know about it?” Sun Wolf’s voice was calmly conversational.

“I—“ the boy stammered. “He is… he is learned…”

“Yeah, and renowned. What kind of magic books does he have?”

“Three or four. Old ones, that he traded for—“

“He says,” remarked the Hawk, and Tiogh seemed to squirm in his saddle.

“What’s he up to now?”

“Still searching,” said Tiogh. “I went to him, told him to take them back to the Citadel. He refused. All day we could hear the Dogs in the streets. At noon – noon! In the light of the sun! – Master Piron, the wheelwright, burst from the door of his house and ran down the street toward Shen’s house, crying out in terror. All could see the dust swirling behind him, and… and after ‘twas over, we saw their tracks, big as a man’s hand, and the spatters of their saliva in the dirt! Piron’s friend Sarbek came running out with his axe to try to defend him, and we saw blood flow where he struck at them. Saw the marks of their teeth, appearing on his arms and legs – saw Piron knocked down, saw the throat torn out of him by invisible fangs. I tried to drag Shen to the window of his study, to make him see, but he thrust me away. He’d drawn ward-signs all around the inside of his house-walls, and he pushed me out, cursing at me for stepping over them…”

He held up his left arm, bandaged tightly.

“I managed to get up on top of a shed. I could see their dust, as they ran off out of the town. When I went back to Shen’s house at evening his door was locked. Through the window I could see him, still searching through his books. I knocked on the window, begged him to take them back.”

“Why would he have listened to you?” asked the Hawk. “Other than the fact that you helped him get them.”

“He—I—“ Under his tan, the young man’s skin flushed.

Sun Wolf raised his shaggy brows.

“I promised him my help in getting them,” replied Tiogh in a stifled voice. “My father was one of the guards at the mine in the days of the Wizard-King. He’d been in and out of the Citadel dozens of times. I had maps he drew, after he hurt his back and left the guards. Shen said, ‘twas only a matter of time, before some wizard who knew the key to the gate-spell came along, to get the Great Grimoire of the Wizard-King. Father had told me everything in there was cursed to Hell and back, but Shen said, once he had his hands on it, he could lift the curses before they had time to strike.”

“And you believed him?” said the Wolf, shaggy eyebrows raised, but Starhawk asked,

“So why’d you promise your help? If your Daddy told you everything in there was cursed?”

The young man flushed redder, if that were possible, and clenched his teeth hard. After a moment he whispered, “Gwenael.”

*

In the time of the old Megantic Empire – Tiogh told them, as the afternoon lengthened and they rode through the dappled light of the woods down the mountain – the Plesh Marshes, just downriver of Zeddyam, had been the principal haunt of Swan Maidens. “My great-grandfather saw them once, he said, when he was a little boy. Great flights of swans that came down out of the twilight, white as moonlight. But when they landed on the water, and came up from the reed-beds and the long stands of iris and mists, they were women, naked save for garments of feathers. These they took off, to bathe and to dance in the moonlight. They were beautiful, beyond the dreams of man, but they said in the village that a man who danced with them, they would drown in the marshes. And any man who lay with one, if he did not first turn her back into a mortal maiden by destroying her garment of feathers, would pine and die.”

“The nuns told us, at the convent,” said Starhawk, “that they had no souls. Like mermaids, they would eat the souls of men.”

Tiogh shook his head. “That isn’t true. I mean, the girls they tempt, who become swan-mays… their souls are not destroyed—“

“The Hawk heard in town they’re coming back.”

Tiogh nodded. “The spring before this one, after Altiokis was destroyed, and wizards started appearing again in the world, great flights of them came down in the twilight, and were gone with the first of the light. Gwenael—“

Again his tongue stumbled on the name.

“The miller’s daughter,” said the Hawk, and the young man nodded sharply, like a man in pain.

“Gwenael Rushwyl,” he said, after a little time. “She was… She and I… Her father’s sister – a poisonous woman, who owns a house of assignation in Mandrigyn! – she and the miller had it fixed up between them, that Gwenael would go to her, and learn to be a courtesan. He wouldn’t listen to my father, when Father and I both begged him for Gwenael’s hand. We promised to each other in secret, Gwenael and I. But then she ran away from the mill one night, and saw the Swan Mays, when they danced in the mists in the Pleshmere. She went back, I guess, again and again, and then one night she… she didn’t return. Her father found her clothes along the marshes. At first they said I’d run off with her, but I hadn’t. She had gone with the Swan Maidens.”

His voice faltered. Through the trees, deer looked out from spotted shadows; a rabbit dashed across a glade where the sun fell clear. They’d be lucky, the Wolf guessed, to make it to Zeddyam by nightfall.

“And you think there’s a recipe in that Grimoire to bring her back?”

“There has to be. They were a study of the Wizard-King’s. My father told me, years ago… shape-shifters, creatures with two souls – two beings. Paltho Shen came to Zeddyam last winter. Father was dead by then, but he’d heard about Father’s maps. He asked me to help him. He was waiting, he said, because he knew a mage would come along eventually, who knew how to get into the Citadel. There would be too many books, too many things to carry out by himself. I said I would help him in whatever he needed, if he would help me get her back. Gwenael.”

He looked ahead at the downward-winding trail, past his horse’s ears, and repeated the name. “Gwenael.”

*

The market-place in the center of the town was empty, when the three companions rode in at dusk. Busy as the place had been three days before, Sun Wolf felt no surprise. Darkness brought back again the tingling sense of danger near-by, the vile sense of movement in the shadows behind his back. Every house they’d passed on the road in had been empty, the shutters up but no threads of light visible through their cracks. No smoke floated from any chimney in the clammy evening chill. From the barns and coops, the Wolf heard the lowing of cattle in fear, the frantic clacking of hens conscious of danger somewhere near. Not a dog ran out to the fences, to challenge the riders as they came by. Not a cat was to be seen.

Tiogh pointed out the house of Paltho Shen, which faced onto the market-place, almost opposite the town well on its platform of brick. This was a sort of widening of the town’s main street where it crossed the broad cart-way that led down to the little harbor, where the boats tied up that fished the salt-marshes, or traded across them with the bayous of the Megantic Estuary. The town donjon faced it, and a little to Sun Wolf’s surprise, its rusted portcullis was down and the gates behind it were shut: “I’d’ve sworn those hinges were rusted solid,” he said.

A great stain of dried blood dyed the cobblestones, just short of the donjon’s rusty gates.

The door of the tavern stood open. On the tables within the empty, echoing common-room six bodies lay, covered with sheets that had slowly soaked up blots of darkening blood. Three men, a woman, and two children, both girls. The Wolf lifted the sheets, looked down at the fear-twisted faces, the bites where chunks of flesh had literally been bitten out of arms and thighs, the gaping, butchery vessels of the torn-out throats.

No wonder nobody went up against the Wizard-King.

One of the men, almost unrecognizably mutilated, was the High Sheriff.

Other than that, the tavern was empty. Sun Wolf helped himself to a draft of ale, and drew others, for the Hawk and Tiogh – who needed it, he judged, as badly as he did.

Crossing the square, he rapped hard on Shen’s door, then moved around to the window that Tiogh said opened from the healer’s study. No light showed behind the shutters, no answer came when he pounded them. No smoke from either of the chimneys.

He went back around to the door, and kicked it in.

Darkness. The twilight in the marketplace was deepening. The prickle of danger that clutched him by the spine tightened. He could smell it, as he’d smelled the blood-stink of demons in the old mines. Starhawk lit her lantern; the light showed her, and Tiogh, what the Wolf could see already. The wizard’s house was empty, every piece of furniture moved into the center of the small front hall – and presumably, he thought, every room in the house – and the walls, and the floor for nearly a foot into the room itself, scribbled with ward-signs. Among the sigils on the bare wooden floor glittered dark trails of silver dust, pale lines of salt. Dribblings of iron filings and blue chalk.

He recognized at least five different – and very common – protective wards. He’s guessing. Marking whatever he can find.

The Wolf knelt, and spreading out his hands, ran them over the ward-signs, an inch or so from the floor. The heat was diffuse. The cold, like a vagrant breath from an ice-house. He’s never passed through the Ordeal.

Maybe he didn’t even know that the horrible shattering of the nerves, the agonies that broke the protective barriers within the mind, were necessary to pass into one’s full power.

Maybe he had heard it, and was hoping there was some other way.

The Wolf shuddered at the recollection of his own birth into power. Don’t blame the poor bastard for that.

There were no books in the study, but by the position of the two bricks that Paltho Shen used as book-ends on the well-dusted shelf, he couldn’t have owned more than four or five. Sun Wolf wondered if any of them were the same as his own pitiful collection back at the Deepgore Hermitage. The worktable showed bare places where books had been heaped, and by the note-tablets and scraps of papyrus that strewed the table. Paltho Shen had worked desperately to find spells to counter the curses which had followed him home. Wards to send back the Invisible Dogs to Hell. Candles were stuck everywhere, burned to puddles of wax with new candles propped in them and likewise consumed to stubs.

He’d worked all night, and the night before. Having seen the bodies in the tavern, Sun Wolf understood.

“Idiot.” He took up the deep-scratched wax tablet nearest him, then a piece of papyrus. “The Fetch-Ward spell must have been in some archaic dialect. Looks like he was translating as he went along. He stops after he says, these signs must be written in the blood.”

“Here, too.” Tiogh picked up another scrap – the Wolf could see that the signs drawn on it were the same. “This is noted, red folio, pg 30…”

“Different volume.” The papyrus in the Wolf’s hand bore the scribble, small – black – steel- p. 93… “Same spell.” He looked over the young man’s shoulder in the flickering lantern-light, comparing them. “Written in the blood. He didn’t like that one, either.”

“This’s the same.” Starhawk picked up another translation, much more cursory, taken from, it seemed, a book designated med – black. “Looks like this particular ward is the only one that fit anything like dogs or hounds. What blood is he talking about?”

Sun Wolf said quietly, knowing it for the truth: “That of the dogs.”

“Get away from that desk!” snapped a voice from the door. “Who are you? What is your—Tiogh!”

Turning, the Wolf saw a young woman framed in the doorway, a crossbow in one hand and an unlit torch in the other. She wore men’s clothing – and looked clumsy and uncomfortable in it, as women did, the Wolf had observed, who weren’t used to it. Her fair hair had been tightly braided and pinned in a no-nonsense knot on the back of her head. She was short, a little plump, and pink-faced in the torchlight, probably from fright. She had to have the heart of a lion, he guessed, to be outside the donjon at all.

“Elys!” Tiogh strode over to her. “What are you doing – is everyone in the donjon?”

“Pretty much. But somebody had to stay outside, to report on what was happening.” Some sound outside made her nearly jump out of her skin, but an instant later she identified it – as the Wolf already had – as a horse neighing in fright. “Master Shen has marked the inner walls of the donjon. I said I’d—Where were you? And who are these?”

She turned, and studied the two former mercenaries with shrewd, sharp gray eyes. “You’re the man who stole Master Shen’s horse,” she said.

“I didn’t steal the frakking horse!” growled the Wolf. “Shen stole my horse – and my goddam book. And he’s the man who didn’t have the pox-festering sense to realize that Altiokis would have put a curse on anything and everything in his Citadel that another wizard could have turned against him, including his festering books.”

Blushing the girl added – for she was, at a guess, only eighteen or so – “And you’re the man who… who left Sheriff Hirgon and the other men, and… and Tiogh…” She couldn’t go on, and didn’t look in Tiogh’s direction.

The young man’s face was scarlet, and since it wasn’t anything that any of the men in question would inform anyone of, the Wolf could only deduce that it was this stout, grave-faced young woman who had discovered them in their semi-draped condition after his escape. But for all her blushes and her literal-mindedness, this girl Elys had volunteered to stay outside what they clearly considered the safe zone…

Not that anybody in that donjon with those books is gonna be safe for a moment…

“Yeah, well, they asked for that. And anyway that wasn’t me either.” He jerked his head toward Starhawk, who nodded in acknowledgement of de-trousering as well as incarcerating the potential pursuit.

Elys startled again – and this time, all of them swung to look towards the outer door. She had closed it, but through its iron-strapped panels – through the heavy wooden shutters of the window – the baying of the dogs could be heard.

Sun Wolf said quietly, “Flaming frakkety damn. There a silver knife in that desk, Hawk? Somebody—“ He glared at Tiogh, “—stole mine out of my saddlebag…”

Elys opened two drawers and a cabinet under the book-shelf, and produced one.

It was his own.

With another oath Sun Wolf took it, and jerked from around Tiogh’s neck the light neck-cloth he wore. “What’re you going to do?” asked the young man nervously.

“I’m gonna do the only frakking thing I can do,” he snarled back, and strode for the door, Starhawk a half-step behind. As they passed through the front hall the Hawk tore a linen cloth from one of the small tables there, scattering a silver bowl and a set of ivory note-tablets, and thrust it into his hand as he approached the front door. Then she turned, and took the torch from Elys.

Sun Wolf lit it with a spell – one of the first he’d learned – then held up his hand and said, “Stay inside for now. Elly, put down that stupid cross-bow and get a broom-handle, or a stave, anything long—“

She obeyed instantly, catching up a long-handled hook that looked as if it were used to open ceiling-traps or high windows.

Outside in the market-place, the horses had begun to scream in terror.

The Wolf shot back the bolt, and jerked the door open.

Under yellow moonlight, the market square was empty. But thin above the dirty cobbles, dust whipped and flittered, the way it would around the feet or any man or beast running through the town. By daylight – even by moonlight – it would not have been seen, for the movement and color and solidness of the feet themselves.

There was nothing. Only the wild skittering of the dust.

The horses broke their reins, took flight like the sensible beasts they were, and Sun Wolf stepped through the door, bellowed “Frakkin’ bunch of god-cursed pups!” and watched for their eyes.

Their eyes caught the light, and he smelled the musty pong of their pelts.

They were all around him. He swung with his sword, felt it bite something; swung again, and took a running leap to the raised brick paving around the well-head. Fragments of moonlight swirled on all sides, reflected from their eyes. He put his back to the stone of the well-head, slashed with the silver knife, and blood fountained over his hand and boot as he felt fangs tear into his calf. Their howling was a storm in his ears. He stamped, kicked, saw more blood splash on the bricks a few feet from him. Tracks in the blood, bigger than any wolf he’d seen since childhood. Another bite tore his shoulder and he yelled, “NOW!” and flung Tiogh’s neck-cloth down on the most bloodied part of the bricks.

Starhawk, Elys, and Tiogh came on the run, having acquired two other torches. Tiogh scooped up Starhawk’s pry-bar that had fallen from her saddle when the horses fled, and the three of them waded into the pack, with fire and steel.

Silence fell. Pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, Starhawk and the two young townsfolk braced themselves, looking around.

The dust settled. The blood – both the Wolf’s and that of the Ghast-Hounds – glittered dark on the bricks, and Sun Wolf knelt to soak the other cloth in the deepest of the puddles. “Gimme your cup,” he said to the Hawk, and pressed the two gore-sodden rags into her hands. “Wring those into the cup – get as much blood as you can. Elly, get papyrus from Shen’s study – a clean one from the desk – and a brush. You, Tio—“ He snatched Elys’s torch from her, and sprang down from the platform, nearly stumbling with the pain in his torn leg. “With me.”

“What—?”

“’Cause you’re the one who knows what books your friend took out of the fortress.” He staggered again on his next step, and caught Tiogh’s shoulder for support. The silence in the market-square was worse than the clamor of the Dogs two minutes before. He thought of Elys going back into that dark house, alone. Glanced back at the Hawk, saw her on the well’s dilapidated edge, short, baby-fine hair like ivory in the moonlight, squeezing and twisting the last droplets of blood from the rags.

Damn it, this better work. I better be right about this.

Pox-festering idiots we should just ride out and leave them…

He pounded on the donjon gate with the pommel of his sword and yelled, “Get out of there! All of you!”

Through it, he heard their voices. A frantic wave-surge of terror, doubt. Children cried and were stilled.

Sounds he’d heard in a thousand sieges, before he and his troops had gone in to rape and kill.

If for no other reason, he knew he owed it to the lives he’d taken, to save these – even if they were damned fools.

A man’s harsh voice shouted, “If you break the spell-circle it will be death to you all!”

“You frakking cretin those things can materialize in any circle you can draw!”

“It’s true!” yelled Tiogh. “Master Shen, he’s right!”

He could feel them. Smell them now, the wet doggy stink of them growing stronger in the still cold air.

“He’s got the blood!” shouted the young man, when no reply came. “The dogs’ blood. He can make a Fetch-ward, if he can see the book—“

“Stupid boy, that’s what he told you?” shrieked Shen. “That’s what you believe?”

“You’ve got every living person in the town in there with you!” the Wolf roared, desperate. “That’s where they’ll appear next! Get out of there!”

“You’re safe here!” shouted Shen, as the voices of the people rose again on the other side of the gate. “You’re safe as long as you don’t break the line of protection!”

“You mean you’re safe as long as there’s six hundred people in there for those things to attack first! Let me in, let me see that book—“

“Liar! Thief!”

Frantic, the Wolf bellowed at him, “Don’t be a frakking imbecile, Shen! What do you think those dogs are going to do, give up and go away? They have one job, one job only, and they are never going to stop! Sooner or later that circle’s gonna get broken when you send somebody out here for water, you idiot! And long before that—“

Inside the crowded courtyard, someone screamed.

Sun Wolf sprang back from the gate, his bitten leg collapsing under him. Tiogh barely had the time to drag him out of the way before the portcullis rattled on its rusty chains, and the inner gates squealed ajar.

Beyond them, in the courtyard, Sun Wolf heard the baying of the dogs.

Tiogh didn’t need to be told. The young man dragged the Wolf back to the well-head, where Starhawk stood guard over papyrus, Elys, and a half-cup of blood, her torch upraised in her hand. There was a sound the Wolf knew well – too well – and hated, when he heard it, over and over, in his dreams. It was the sound he’d heard, a thousand times, when his men would break into whatever stronghold or courtyard or citadel that the civilians of a besieged town had taken for a last hold-out, a final refuge. The screaming of women, when the Wolf’s mercenaries came storming up out of cellars that had been tunneled, or dropped down from a breach in a wall. Children shrieking in terror. Men yelling as they turned to fight with whatever makeshift weapons they had, knowing it would do them no good.

A slit of torchlight gashed between the leaves of the gate as they opened, showed him the courtyard, as he’d suspected it would be, packed, heaving and boiling like a stew-pot. Men, women, children crawling, wriggling under the portcullis (Of course the damn thing stuck!), running desperately into the darkness.

The baying of the hounds in the courtyard was like thunder.

With the calm deliberation he’d learned as a commander of mercenaries, Sun Wolf turned back to the papyrus, the writing-brush, the cup of blood. “Bring them torches down,” he said. There was a time for fighting, and a time for turning his mind away from the slaughter, to concentrate…

Tiogh cried out and would have sprung down from the platform, but Elys caught his arm. “Don’t—“

“I have to save him!”

The Wolf said, “You can’t.” He dipped the brush in the blood, called the words to mind that he’d read on Shen’s translated note-tablets, took three breaths, and dropped his mind into the dark of meditation, where magic dwelled.

There was the sigil that Shen had copied from the books. He prayed the copy was accurate: the words whispered, as the design was traced in the blood of the Invisible Dogs. It took only moments, and he was aware on the periphery of reality – like looking back through a window into a lighted room – of people fleeing, scrambling under the portcullis, of lights jerking and juddering in the donjon’s upper windows as people fled there, of screaming in the courtyard. When the sigil was done he brought himself to the surface, said, “With me,” and, surrounded by the Hawk, Tiogh, and Elys, limped across the market-square to the half-opened gates.

Most of the torchlight was gone from the central court. He could smell the dogs beyond, even above the smell of blood all over the pavement. Three torches lay burning on the brick pavement across which he’d been hauled only three days previously, and four bodies, besides that of Paltho Shen, half-curled around a stack of blood-splattered books.

Shen – balding, sixty-ish, paunchy (and Starhawk was right about his nose) – and two of the men in the court had been torn almost literally to pieces by the dogs. The other two bodies (the Wolf ascertained later) were a woman and a half-grown boy, who had been trampled. But at the moment that he reached Shen he could hear the dogs still hunting, baying as they ran about the donjon, pursuing whoever they could find. Screams of panic. Frantic cries of terror and pain.

“This one—“

Tiogh picked it up, nearly a cubit in height and almost square, bound in red leather and iron.

Old, thought the Wolf as he touched it. Far older than Altiokis had ever been.

“Where’s the others?”

The young man made a little stack of them on the stone bench beside the door to the cells where the Wolf had been taken, seven of them. Grubby, blood-stained, leather covers damaged with mold. In his later years, the Wizard-King had worked magic less and less, as his mind had decayed. He probably hadn’t touched these for decades.

“You’re sure that’s all of them?”

The young man nodded. A man fell, screaming, from a parapet above; Sun Wolf saw for a moment the gleam of the dogs’ eyes in the dim torch-light at the top of that wall. Then they vanished. An instant later, he heard the scratch of their claws on the cobbles of the courtyard, saw the fallen body twitch and jerk as huge rents appeared in the flesh—

And when they’re done they’ll turn on us…

He opened the Great Grimoire to page 30, read – with difficulty, and with the assistance of Shen’s translation – the words of the closing formula. He was conscious of Starhawk and the others behind him, torches held out. Of the rattle of claws approaching, of the glint of fire reflected in savage eyes.

He had no idea what the words meant, but he shouted them aloud anyway, the papyrus laid before him on the stack of books, the blood of the Fetch-ward written on it still sticky, drying and smearing where the gore had run. He refused to think what might happen if some of his own blood had been mixed with that of the dogs, if he were sealing himself into wherever it was, that such creatures disappeared to until they were summoned forth again…

And in the event, no such thing occurred.

The eyes disappeared. The smell of the Ghast-Hounds dispersed, like smoke in the wind.

Silence filled the courtyard, save for the sobbing of a child somewhere in the donjon, and the far-off, protesting gronch of a donkey disturbed by the uproar on one of the empty farms.

Sun Wolf folded up the papyrus, and, not knowing quite what else to do with it, tucked it into his doublet pocket. Does this mean I can summon the Invisible Dogs to MY bidding?

He found he was shaking, and wondered how much blood he’d lost.

Six men emerged from the donjon, grue-splattered short-swords and pikes clutched inexpertly in their hands. Old Wrinkle-Puss – Tiogh had said at one point that afternoon that the little man’s name was actually Ohrin – held out his hand to Sun Wolf.

And when Sun Wolf took it, the little man – presumably acting on behalf of the deceased High Sheriff – signed to his companions, who clapped a pair of manacles on Sun Wolf’s wrists and put the point of a sword against his back.

“Sun Wolf of Wrynde,” said Wrinkle-Puss, “you’re under arrest.”

*

They arrested Starhawk that time, also. “They’ve gone to blow up the rest of the Citadel,” reported Tiogh, who came to visit the Wolf in his cell the following day. He had better amenities than he’d had at his last stay in the Zeddyam town donjon – a bed, a blanket, more-or-less decent food (Ohrin’s wife couldn’t cook to save her life, but Elys brought him stew and apples). They’d even brought in the local midwife to clean and stitch the wounds on his shoulder and leg. Though the chain was longer, they still kept him chained to the wall.

“Mines, vaults, everything—“

“They’ll be goddam lucky if they don’t get a whole new set of curses down on them,” grumbled the Wolf, though he didn’t actually think this was likely. In three years, nothing had happened to him, and he’d set off the explosion that had brought the whole edifice down in the first place.

“I did get all the books away safe,” said the young man. “Not just those Master Shen took from the vaults of the Citadel, but… but his other books. Ohrin doesn’t know.”

Sun Wolf bit back his opinions about what Ohrin and everybody else in Zeddyam could do with any number of Paltho Shen’s books, and only said, “Thank you.”

Tiogh pressed his face against the barred judas of the door, his dark eyes earnest. “Please don’t think—“ he began, and Sun Wolf growled.

“Please don’t think Ohrin – or anyone here – feels any malice towards you or Lady Starhawk,” Tiogh stammered. “But Ohrin says – and I think he’s right – that wizards are… wizards are different from other people. And as Master Shen showed, they’ll do nearly anything to get objects, or books, of magic. Even – even you, I think.”

Can’t argue with him there…

Would I put a whole town in danger, to get at those books?

Sun Wolf knew he’d been thinking seriously about risking a trip back to get the other things: dragon-bone, werewolf claws.

The blood of Swan-Mays.

Do I know FOR CERTAIN that a curse wouldn’t fall on others besides myself?

“Ohrin says, it’s better that nobody can touch any of it. I’ll give you the books, as soon as…” The boy hesitated, flushing in the pale light of the barred window, as if with shame at hearing his own words.

“As soon as I’m on my way out of town?” asked the Wolf gently. “Or as soon as I fetch back your swan-may, and return her to you?”

In a voice scarcely audible from embarrassment, Tiogh whispered, “Both.”

*

The spell to summon a swan-maiden was, as Sun Wolf had suspected, in one of the black grimoires, and was fairly straightforward. Its ingredients were simple, and Sun Wolf and the Hawk hid for a day in an abandoned fisher-hut on the edge of the Pleshmere, while Tiogh rode back to Zeddyam to buy the herbs in the market. Sun Wolf had half a mind to ride out and let the young juggins come back to an empty hideout, but Starhawk shook her head and said, “He did give you all Paltho Shen’s books.”

“They’re mostly trash.” Sun Wolf shifted his back against the wattle of the hut wall, and flipped the pages where they lay in the bar of morning sunlight by the door. “Figures, given his judgment about how to handle magic. The only one that’s worth anything – the one that he put together from what Tiogh’s dad remembered of the Citadel – will be useless now.”

Elys confirmed this guess, when she came out at noon with food for them, meat pie and ale, and more apples from her mother’s trees. “Some of the men were enslaved in the mines,” she explained. “They knew where to plant charges of blasting-powder.” Now, clothed in a blue linen frock, with her fair hair in tidy plaits wrapped around her head, she was almost pretty. “Nobody went far inside – there are stories of demons still roving in the darkness there – but nobody can get in, not through the mines, not through the Citadel above. It’s better, Uncle Ohrin says, that no one be able to touch the things there, neither for evil nor for good. You can destroy yourself, and everyone around you, so easily with magic. Best let it alone.”

“Unless it’ll get you something you want,” remarked the Hawk, raising one pale brow, and Elys looked aside, round cheeks going pink.

“Ti has wanted Gwenael for years,” said the girl in a stifled voice. “He nearly broke his heart over her, when her father wouldn’t let them wed. Since she escaped – since she became a may – it’s all he could think of. All he wanted.”

“And what did she want?” asked the Hawk.

Quietly, Elys said, “She wanted to be free.”

*

With the rising of the moon the swans came down, a long flight of them, like a river of white flowers flowing from the velvet sky. From the protective circle of spells that rendered him and his companions invisible to the shape-shifters, Sun Wolf watched them float for a moment on the silver mere, then plunge in, and as maidens wade ashore. His voice barely more than the breath of the wind, Tiogh whispered, “There. Dark hair.”

And Sun Wolf didn’t really blame him, for having bargained with Paltho Shen and risked the curses of Altiokis, in order to have her. Hell, he’d have gone after her himself, if he hadn’t known the Hawk would break his leg for him if he did.

She’d have made a fortune as a courtesan in Mandrigyn, with that delicate oval face, that mouth just slightly wider, just slightly less perfect than perfect, enough to be interesting. The eyes beneath the moth-wing brows were green, wide, and filled with life; when she shed her garment of feathers, her breasts were worth sacking a city for, her thighs a song of beauty itself.

She’d have made a fortune, he thought, for her father. And her money-grubbing aunt.

He heard Elys’ breath go out of her in a little sigh. Glancing down, he saw that plain, plump girl looking at Tiogh’s face, her heart in her eyes.

The swan-mays formed a ring, holding hands. Pale nude bodies – and one or two dark ones – shimmered in the moonlight, their faces full of joy. The touch of their hands, the clasp of their arms around each others’ waists when the dance brought them together, seemed to bring the unheard music almost into the waking world. They understand each other, he thought, as no one fully human does. As he, for all his loathing of Paltho Shen, had understood the rival wizard to whom he’d barely said a dozen words.

His eyes went to Starhawk. She, he saw, understood, at least in part: she who had walked alone, ridden alone. She who had fled to the mercenary armies as a warrior, as Gwenael had fled to the swan-mays. She whose soul flew alone, even when she rode at his side, or lay in his arms.

The spell would cover him from their eyes for – the Grimoire said – ‘five beats of the heart.’ He found himself wishing that he had it wrong, as he stepped from the circle, strode to the place where he had mentally marked it, where Gwenael had laid her garment down.

As he snatched it up the other swan-mays whirled in panic. Their eyes, he saw, were not human – bird-eyes, yellow, expressionless, slightly demented, as those who seek the freedom of the skies often are. For an instant he was surrounded by a hammering storm of white wings, beaks pecking and snapping at his arms and face, knocking him to his knees and taking his breath away. Trying to drive him into the mere. He clung to the white garment, buried his face in his arms. Then they swirled up around him like a whirlwind, and were gone.

He could hear the beating of their wings, far overhead, as he raised his face and saw Tiogh a few yards away, holding Gwenael by the wrists.

For a moment her face was the face of a swan-may still, unhuman and exquisite, though twisted with mindless avian fear. But when he said, “Gwenael?” human sight came back to her eyes. She stared into his face, knowing him. With a rush she seemed to realize she was naked, and pulling her arm from his grasp, turned away from him, covering herself with her arms and the sable cloak of her dripping hair.

When she looked back at him, Sun Wolf saw tears on her face.

“Gwenael?” Ti said again, more softly.

The girl only turned her face away, weeping.

Weeping for what she had lost.

After a long moment, Tiogh walked back to where Sun Wolf knelt in a welter of bruises and feathers, and took the white garment from his hands. The spell would conclude with a drop of the trapped swan-may’s blood dabbed on the garment, the garment itself burned in a fire of herbs and sandalwood. But instead Tiogh carried it back – it was like part of a swan’s skin, without wings or neck or feet – and laid it down on the ground beside the girl he loved.

For a moment Gwenael looked at him across it. Then she laid her hands on his shoulders, and kissed his lips., picking up the garment, she brought it to her breast, and in an instant, with the rush of heated air that accompanies shape-shifting, she seemed snatched up by a whirlwind.

A beating of snowy wings in the moonlight, and she was gone.

*

“You going to try going back to the Citadel?” asked Starhawk, later, as she and the Wolf rode up the trail that threaded the back-side of the Tchard Mountains, headed for home.

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “Though I’m guessing those riders behind us—“ They’d been aware since they broke camp before sunrise that morning that they were being followed at a discreet distance, “—are Ohrin and his posse, making sure we get the hell off Zeddyam territory. We’d have to deal with them. And Elys seemed to think there was no way back into the Citadel vaults barring an army of miners, and she should know. She’s a girl with a head on her shoulders.”

Starhawk nodded thoughtfully, pale sunlight flickering across her colorless hair. By tomorrow they’d cross over into the drier territory, the higher and more rugged mountains, of the Stren Valley. With luck, they’d reach Deepgore before first snow.

“You put a love-spell on Ti, to make him fall in love with her?”

“I thought about it,” the Wolf said again. “She sure as hell deserved something for her courage, and the gods know she’ll make him a good wife. But I think the gods know more about this stuff than we do. Maybe she deserves better than him.”

“Since we’ve pretty much been kicked out of the only part of the Thanelands where we hadn’t been kicked out of before,” said the Hawk thoughtfully, “you think maybe the gods might be telling you to stay home at the hermitage and study your books instead of riding all over the countryside looking for more magic?”

“You go to hell.”

“Been there,” said the Hawk, and their eyes met.

Sun Wolf sighed, and nudged Widowmaker to a quicker walk, the sooner to reach home. “Me, too,” he said.

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series - short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way - with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna - in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.