Mandrigyn was the queen city of the Megantic Sea, the crossroads of trade; even in the bitter slate colors of the winter day, it glittered like a spilled jewel box, turquoise, gold, and crystal. Sun Wolf looked upon Mandrigyn and shivered.
Above the town rose the dark masses of the Tchard Mountains, the huge shape of Grimscarp veiled in a livid rack of purplish clouds, as if the Wizard King sought to conceal his fortress from prying eyes. Closer to, he could identify the trashy gaggle of markets and bawdy theaters as East Shore—the suburb that Gilden Shorad had told him lay outside the city’s jurisdiction on the eastern bank of the Rack River. The colors of raw wood and cheap paint stood out like little chips of brightness against the rolling masses of empty, furze-brown hills that lay beyond; the Thanelands, where the ancient landholders still held their ancestral sway.
A gust of rain struck him, cold and stinging through the drab canvas of his shirt. As he hunched his shoulders against it like a wet animal, he felt the unfamiliar hardness of metal against his flesh, the traditional slave collar, a slip-chain like a steel noose that the ship’s aged handyman had affixed around his neck.
He glanced back over his shoulder, hatred in his eyes, but Yirth had vanished from the poop deck. Sailors, at least half of them women or young boys, were scrambling up and down the rigging, making the vessel ready to be guided into the quays.
There was little activity in the harbor, most shipping having ceased a week ago in anticipation of the storms. Of the sailors and stevedores whom Sun Wolf could see about the docks, most were older men, young boys, or women. The city, he thought, had been hard hit indeed. As the rain-laden gusts of wind drove the ship toward the wharves, he could hear a ragged cheer go up from the vast gaggle of unveiled and brightly clad women who loitered on the pillared promenade of the long seafront terrace that overlooked the harbor. Friends of Denga Rey’s, he guessed, noting the couple of nasty-looking female gladiators who swaggered in their midst.
Well, why not? Business is probably damned slow these days.
At some distance from that rowdy mob he picked out other welcoming committees. There was a tall girl and a taller woman whose ivory-blond hair, whipped by the wind from beneath their desperately clutched indigo veils, proclaimed them as kin of Gilden Shorad’s. With them was a lady as tiny, and as fashionably dressed, as Gilden-family, he thought, no error.
Farther back, among the pillars of the windswept promenade, a couple of liveried servants held an oiled-silk canopy over the head of a tiny woman in amethyst moire, veiled in trailing clouds of lilac silk and glittering with gold and diamonds. With that kind of ostentation, he thought, she has to be a friend of Sheera’s. No one, evidently, had come to meet Yirth.
A voice at his elbow said quietly, “We made it into harbor just in time.”
He turned to see Sheera beside him, covered, as befitted a lady, from crown to soles, her hands encased in gold-stitched kid, her hair a mass of curls and jewels that supported the long screens of her plum-colored veils. She held a fur-lined cloak of waterproof silk tightly around her; Sun Wolf, wearing only the shabby, secondhand shirt and breeches of a stave, studied her for a moment, fingering the chain around his neck, then glanced back at the vicious sea visible beyond the headlands. Even in the shelter of the harbor, the waters churned and threw vast columns of bone-white spray where they struck the stone piers; no ship could make it through the channel now. “If you ask me, we cut that a little too close for comfort,” he growled.
Sheera’s lips tightened under the blowing gauze. “No one asked you,” she replied thinly. “You have Yirth to thank that we’re alive at all. She’s been existing on drugs and stamina for the last three days to hold off the storms until we could make port.”
“I have Yirth to thank,” Sun Wolf said grimly, “that I’m on this pox-rotted vessel to begin with.”
There was a momentary silence, Sheera gazing up into his eyes with a dangerous tautness to her face. By the look of it, she hadn’t gotten much more sleep in the last several days than Yirth had. Sun Wolf returned her gaze calmly, almost mockingly, daring her to fly into one of her rages.
When she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. “Just remember,” she said, “that I could speak to Yirth and let you scream yourself to death.”
Equally softly, he replied, “Then you’d have to find someone else to train your ladies, wouldn’t you?”
Sheera’s next words were forestalled by the arrival of Gilden, veiled diaphanously and preceding a whole line of porters bearing enough luggage for a year in the wilds. She said quietly to Sheera, “Yirth’s in her cabin. She’ll wait until the crowds have thinned off a bit, then slip away unnoticed. The ship’s coming in this way ahead of the storm will have attracted enough notice as it is; we don’t want any of Derroug’s spies reporting to Altiokis that Yirth was on board.”
Sheera nodded. “All right,” she agreed, and Gilden moved off, slipping back effortlessly into the role of an indefatigably frivolous, middle-class globe-trotter amid the welter of her luggage.
They had come in among the quays now, the crew making the ship fast to the long stone wharf. The wet air crackled with orders, curses, and shouts. Farther up the rail, Denga Rey and Amber Eyes were leaning over to wave and call to their cronies on the dock. The fitful, blowing gusts of rain beaded the gladiator’s shaven scalp and the courtesan’s soft, apricot-colored mane of unveiled hair; both Gilden and Sheera, as was proper for women of their station and class, ignored them totally.
The gangplank was let down. A couple of sailors, a woman and a boy, brought up Sheera’s trunk. After a single burning, haughty stare from Sheera, Sun Wolf lifted it to his shoulder and carried it down the cleated ramp at her heels.
The wharves of Mandrigyn. as the Wolf had seen from the deck of the ship, were connected at their landward end by a columned promenade, undoubtedly a strolling place in the heal of the summer for the fashionable of the town. In the winter, with its elaborate topiary laid naked by the winds and its marble pillars and statues stained and darkened by flickering rain, it was drafty and depressing. At a score of intervals along its length, it was broken by brightly tiled footbridges that crossed the mouths of Mandrigyn’s famous canals; looking down through the nearest bridge’s half-hexagon archway, the Wolf could see a sort of sheltered lagoon there, where halt” a dozen gondolas rocked on their moorings. Beyond these rainbow-colored, minnow like boats, the canal wound away into the watery city between the high walls of the houses, the waters shivering where they were brushed by squalls of rain. Everything seemed dark with wetness and clammy with moss. Against this background, the tiny lady who emerged from beneath her oiled-silk canopy to greet Sheera seemed incongruously gaudy.
“Sheera, I was terrified you wouldn’t make it into the harbor!” she cried in a high, rather light voice and extended tiny hands, gloved in diamond-speckled confections of white and lavender lace.
Sheera took her hands in greeting, and they exchanged a formal kiss of welcome amid a whirl of wind-torn silk veils. “To tell you the truth, I was afraid of that myself.” she admitted, with a smile that was the closest Sun Wolf had seen her get to warm friendliness in all their short acquaintance. Sheera was evidently fond of this woman—and, by her next remark, very much in her confidence.
“Did you find one?” the tiny lady asked, looking up into Sheera’s face with a curiously intent expression, as if for the moment, Sheera and Sheera alone existed for her. “Did you succeed?”
“Well,” Sheera said, and her glance flickered to Sun Wolf, standing stoically, the trunk balanced on his shoulder, a little way off. “There has been a change in plans.”
The woman frowned indignantly, as if at an affront. “What? How?” The wind caught in her lilac-colored veils, blowing them back to reveal a delicate-complected, fine-boned face, set off by beautiful brown eyes under long, perfectly straight lashes. For all that she was as overdressed as a saint in a Trinitarian cathedra], she was a well-made little thing. Sun Wolf judged, both dainty and full-breasted. No girl, but a woman of Sheera’s age.