Sheera introduced them quietly. “Drypettis Dru, sister to the governor of Mandrigyn. Captain Sun Wolf, chief of the mercenaries of Wrynde.”
Drypettis’ eyes, originally dark with indignation at being presented to a slave, widened with shock, then flickered quickly back to Sheera. “You brought their commander here?”
From the direction of the ship, the whole gaudy crowd of what looked like prostitutes and gladiators came boiling past them, laughing and joking among themselves. At the sight of Sun Wolf, they let fly a volley of appreciative whistles, groans, and commentary so outspoken that Drypettis Dru stiffened with shocked indignation, and blood came stinging up under the thin skin of her cheeks.
“Really, Sheera,” she whispered tightly, “if we must have people like that in the organization, can’t you speak to them about being a little more—more seemly in public?”
“We’re lucky to have them in our organization, Dru,” Sheera said soothingly. “They can go anywhere and know everything—and we will need them all the more now.”
The limpid brown eyes darted back to Sheera. “You mean you were asked for more money than you could offer?”
“No,” Sheera said quietly. “I can’t explain here. I’ve told Gilden to spread the word. There’s a meeting tonight at midnight in the old orangery in my gardens. I’ll explain to everyone then.”
“But...”
Sheera lifted a finger to her for silence. From the direction of the nearest lagoon, a couple of elderly servants were approaching, bowing with profuse apologies to Sheera for being late. She made a formal curtsy to Drypettis and took her leave, walking toward the gondola moored at the foot of a flight of moss-slippery stone stairs without glancing back to see if Sun Wolf were following. After a moment, he did follow, but he felt Drypettis’ eyes on his back all the way.
While one servitor was making Sheera comfortable under a canopy in the waist of the gondola, Sun Wolf handed the trunk down the narrow steps to the other one. Before descending, he looked back along the quay, deserted now, with the masts of the ships tossing restlessly against the scudding rack of the sky. He saw the woman Yirth, like a shadow, come walking slowly down the gangplank and pause at its bottom, leaning upon the bronze bollard there as if she were close to stumbling with exhaustion. Then, after a moment, she straightened up, pulled her plain frieze cloak more tightly about her, and walked away into the darkening city alone.
From his loft above the orangery. Sun Wolf could hear the women arriving. He heard the first one come in silence, her footfalls a faint, tapping echo in the wooden spaces of the huge room. He heard the soft whisper of talk when the second one joined her. From the loft’s high window, he could see their catlike shapes slip through the postern gate at the bottom of the garden that gave onto the Learn Canal and glide silently from the stables, where, Sheera had told him, there was an old smugglers’ tunnel to the cellar of a building on the Learn Lagoon. He watched them scuttle through the shadows of the wet, weedy garden, past the silhouetted lacework of the bathhouse pavilion, and with unpracticed stealth, into the orangery itself.
He had to admit that Sheera had not erred in her choice of location. The orangery was the farthest building from the house, forming the southern end of the quadrangle of its outbuildings. A strip of drying yard, the property wall, and the muddy, greenish canal called Mothersditch separated it from the nearest other building, the great laundries of St. Quillan, which closed up at the third hour of the night. There was little chance they would be overheard if they practiced here.
He lay in the darkness on his narrow cot, listened to the high-pitched, muted babble in the room below, and thought about women.
Women. Human beings who are not men.
Who had said that to him once? Starhawk—last winter, or the winter before, when she was explaining something about that highly individual fighting style of hers... It was something he had not thought of at the time. Now it came back to him, with the memory of those gray, enigmatic eyes.
Human beings who are not men.
Even as a child, he had understood that the demons that haunted the empty marshlands around his village were entities like himself, intelligent after their fashion, but not human. Push them, and they did not react like men.
He had met men who feared women and he understood that fear. Not a physical fear—indeed, it was this type of man who was often guilty of the worst excesses during the sacking of a city. This fear was something deeper. And yet the other side of that coin was the yearning to touch, to possess, the desire for the soft and alien flesh.
There was no logic to it. But training this troop wasn’t going to be like training a troop of inexperienced boys, or of men, none of whom weighed over a hundred and thirty pounds.
The day’s rain had broken after sundown. A watery gleam of moonlight painted the slanted wall above his head. With the cold wind, voices from the garden blew in—Sheera’s, speaking to those wealthier women who had come, as if to a party, in their gondolas to the front door of her great, marble-faced townhouse. Women’s voices, like music in the wet night.
Was it training, he wondered, that made women distrustful of one another? The fact that so much was denied them? Maybe, especially in a city like Mandrigyn, where the women were close-kept and forbidden to do those things that would free them from the tutelage of men. He’d seen that before—the hothouse atmosphere of gossip and petty jealousies, of wrongs remembered down through the years arid unearthed, fresh and stinking, on the occasions of quarrels. Would women be different if they were brought up differently?
Would men?
His father’s bitter, mocking laughter echoed briefly through his mind.
Then he became aware that someone was standing by the foot of his bed.
He had not seen her arrive, nor heard the petal-fall of her feet on the floorboards. Only now he saw her face, floating like a misshapen skull above the dark blob of the birthmark, framed in the silver-shot masses of her hair. He was aware that she had been standing there for some time.
“What the...” he began, rising, and she held up her hand.
“I have only come to lay on you the bounding-spells to hold the poison in your veins harmless, so long as you remain in Mandrigyn,” she said. “As I am not a true wizard, not come to the fullness of my power, I cannot work spells at a distance by the mind alone.” Like a skeleton hand, her white fingers moved in the air, and she added, “It is done.”
“You did it all right on the ship,” he grumbled sullenly.
One end of that black line of eyebrow moved. “You think so? It is one of the earliest things wizards know—how to come and go unnoticed, even by someone who might be looking straight at them.” She gathered her cloak about her, a rustling in the darkness, preparing to go. “They are downstairs now. Will you join them?”
“Why should I?” he asked, settling his shoulders back against the wall at the bed’s head. “I’m only the hired help.”
The rosewood voice was expressionless. “Perhaps to see what you will have to contend with? Or to let them see it?”
After a moment, he got to his feet, the movement of his shoulders easing a little the unaccustomed pressure of the chain. As he came closer to her, he saw how ravaged Yirth’s face was by exhaustion. The black smudges beneath her eyes, the harsh lines of strain, did nothing for her looks. The last days of the voyage were worn into her face and spirit as coal dust wore itself into a miner’s hands—to be lightened by time, maybe, but never to be eradicated.