Tonight was the first time she had treated him like a partner in the same enterprise, rather than a customer.
The orangery below them was silent now, and the garden still but for the incessant whisper of the canal beyond the walls. After a final, inconclusive quarrel with Sheera, Sun Wolf had gone to the bathhouse, dark after the departure of the women, its only light the soft, red pulsation under the copper boilers. By this dim glow, he’d stripped, left his clothes on the baroque, black and gilt marble bench in the antechamber, washed, and then swum for a time in the lightless waters of the hot pool.
It had eased his muscles, if not his feelings.
When Amber Eyes had been too long silent, he said, “She’s crazy if she thinks she’s going to rescue this Prince Tarrin safe and sound. Oh, I know someone’s supposed to have seen him alive, but they always say that of a popular ruler.”
“Oh, no.” She sat up a little, those gold kitten eyes very earnest in the wan moonlight. “I’ve seen him. In fact, I delivered a message to him only a few weeks ago, the last time I was up in the mines making maps.”
Sun Wolf stared at her. “What?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “We’ve all seen him—Cobra, Crazy-red ...” She named two of the other courtesans in the troop. “Plus a lot of the girls you cut—the pros, I mean. How else could we let him know what’s going on here?”
“You mean,” Sun Wolf said slowly, “you’ve been in communication with the men all along?”
“Of course.” Amber Eyes sat up with a swift, compact lightness and shook out the splendid pale gold mane around shoulders that gleamed like alabaster in the shadows. She seemed to forget the languid grace of a courtesan and hugged her arms around her knees. “I expect Sheera didn’t want to tell you about it,” she added frankly, “but that end of the organization was set up—oh, long before we went to fetch you.”
The disingenuous phrase made him smile. For all her shy appearance, when she wasn’t hiding behind what Sun Wolf thought of as her professional manner, Amber Eyes could be disarmingly outspoken. He’d seen it in her dealings with other women in the troop. It was as if she showed to men—to her customers—only what they thought they wanted to see.
“Did Sheera set that up?” he wanted to know.
She shook her head. “This was before Sheera and Dru got into it. It came about almost by chance, really. Well, you know that the city was very hard hit, with the men gone. We—the pros—didn’t feel it emotionally so sharply, except for those who had regular lovers who had marched with Tarrin. But I remember one afternoon I went to Gilden’s hairdressing parlor—all of us who can afford the prices go to Gilden and Wilarne—and she said that her own husband had been killed, but that Wilarne didn’t know whether Beddick—her husband—was alive or dead. Gilden said that many others were in the same situation. Wilarne was half distracted by grief—not that Beddick was anyone to compose songs about, mind you—and I said I’d see what I could learn. So I went riding in the foothills near one of the southern entrances to the mines that looks out onto Iron Pass and I let my horse get away from me and pretended to sprain my foot—the usual.” She smiled with remembered amusement. “The superintendent of that end of the mines was very gallant.
“After that it was easy. The next time I went up, I brought friends. The superintendents of the various sections of the mines and the sergeants of the guards don’t get into town often. It’s forbidden to them to have women up to the barracks, but who’s going to report it? Gilden and I were able to set up a regular information service that way, getting news of who was dead and who was alive—Beddick the Bland for one, and, eventually, Tarrin.”
Her face clouded in the veiled moonlight. “That was how Sheera came into it in the first place. She’d heard that there was a way of getting news. She got word to me through Gilden. By that time we had girls going up almost every day and we were starting to pass messages in code. Tarrin, it turned out, was starting to organize the miners already, passing messages from gang to gang as they were taken here and there to different work sites in the mines. The men are taken from one place to another in darkness, so they haven’t any clear idea of where they are in the tunnels; if a man wanders away from his gang, he can wander in the deeper tunnels until he dies. The tunnels arc gated, too, and locked off from one another. But they were starting to work up maps by the time we got in touch with them. On our end, we’d already begun to make maps of the mine entrances, the guardrooms, and where the main barracks are that guard the tunnels from the mines up into the Citadel of Grimscarp itself.”
Sun Wolf frowned. “There are ways from the Citadel down into the mines?”
“That’s what the miners say. It’s because the Citadel’s so inaccessible from the outside—it’s very defensible, of course, but because of the way it’s placed, on the very edge of the cliff, the road from Racken Scrag—the Wizard King’s administrative town at the other end of Iron Pass—has to tunnel through a shoulder of the mountain itself even to get to the gates. Since it was so expensive to bring food up the Scarp, they connected that tunnel directly with the mines; now they haul the food straight up from Racken through the mountain itself. The ways into the Citadel from the mines are said to be heavily guarded by magic and illusion.”
“But if you women storm the mines,” the Wolf said grimly, “Altiokis can send his troops right down on top of you directly from the Citadel. Isn’t that right?”
“Well.. .”Amber Eyes said unhappily. “If we strike quickly enough...”
“Wonderful.” He sighed and slumped back against the pillows. “More battles have been lost because some fool of a general was basing his plans on ‘if this or that.’”
“We do have Yirth, though,” the girl said defensively. “She can protect us against the worst of Altiokis’ magic and spot his illusions.”
“Yirth.” He sniffed, his fingers involuntarily touching the metal links of his chain. “Thai’s how she got into this, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes.” Amber Eyes looked down at her hands, restlessly pleating a corner of the sheet between her fingers. Outside, a wind-tossed branch scratched like a ghoul’s fingers at the roof. The lantern on a passing gondola reflected in a watery smear of dark gold against the window’s rippled glass.
“It was Sheera who brought Yirth into it,” she said at length. “We all knew Yirth, of course—I don’t think there’s a woman in the city who hasn’t gone to her for contraceptives, abortions, love philters, or just because she’s the only doctor in the city who’s a woman. Sheera was one of the very few who knew she was a wizard. She never had anything to do with the organization when all we did was pass information back and forth.
“But when Sheera came into it—she changed it. Before, it had all been so hopeless. What was the point in communicating with the men in the mines, even if they were men you loved, if there was no hope of their ever getting out? If something went wrong here—if your property was confiscated, or your friends arrested—you couldn’t tell them of it, really, because it would only add to their misery. But Sheera was the one who said that where information could be exchanged, plans could be formed. She gave us hope.
“And then Dru figured out a way that we could get money from the treasury, and they started raising funds to hire mercenaries. And ...” She spread her hands, her fine fingers almost translucent in the ivory moonlight. “Our organization became a part of theirs—and Tarrin’s. Tarrin and the men are still getting us information on the mines, sending it through the skags...”
“The what?” The word was familiar to him from mercenary slang; he knew it to mean the cheapest sort of women who’d sell themselves to hide tanners and garbagemen for the price of a cup of inferior wine.