“Including me?”
“Including you.”
“Thank you for your frankness, Shahr Baraz. It’s strange. Since coming to live amongst the Merduks I have met more honest men than I ever did in my life before. There is you, Mehr Jirah, and the monk, Albrec.”
“Three men are not so many. Were folk so dishonest in Aekir, then?” Shahr Baraz asked with a smile.
Her face clouded. She looked away.
“I’m sorry, lady. I did not mean to-”
“It’s nothing. Nothing at all. I will get used to it in time. People can grow accustomed to all manner of things.”
There was a pause. “I will be outside the door if you need me for anything, lady,” Shahr Baraz said at last. He bowed and left the room, when what he wanted to do was take her in his arms. As he resumed his post outside her door he scourged himself for his weakness, his absurdity. She was too fine to be a Merduk broodmare, and yet he thought there could be a core of pure steel behind those lovely eyes. That fellow she had loved in Aekir, who had been her husband: he must have been a man indeed. She deserved no less.
SIXTEEN
Bardolin squatted on the stone floor and rubbed his wrists thoughtfully. The sores had dried up and healed in a matter of moments. The only evidence of his suffering that remained were the silver scars on his skin. He felt his shaven chin and chuckled with wonder.
“My God, I am a man again.”
“You were never anything else,” Golophin said shortly from his chair by the fire. Have yourself some wine, Bard. But go easy. Your stomach will not be used to it.”
Bardolin straightened and rose from the floor with some difficulty, grimacing. “I’m not yet used to standing upright, either. It’s been three months since I was able to stretch my limbs. God, my throat is as dry as sand. I have not talked so much in a year, Golophin. It is good to get it all out at last. It helps the healing. Even your magicks cannot restore me wholly in a moment.”
“And your magicks, Bardolin: what of them? You should have recovered from the loss of your familiar by now. What about your own Disciplines? Are they still there, or has the change stifled them?”
Bardolin said nothing. He sipped his wine carefully and eyed the pile of junk at one side of the circular tower room. His chains lay there, with his blood and filth still encrusted upon them. And the splintered fragments of the crate they had transported him here within. Six brawny longshoremen terrified out of their wits as the thing within the crate roared and snarled at them and beat against the walls of its wooden prison. They had tumbled the crate off the end of their waggon and then urged the frightened horses into a gallop, fleeing the lonely tower with all the speed they could whip out of the beasts.
“It comes and goes without any reason or rhyme,” he said finally. “As every day passes it grows more uncontrollable. The wolf, I mean.”
“That will pass. In time you and the beast will mesh together more fully, and you will be able to change form at will. I have seen it before.”
“I’m glad one of us is an expert,” Bardolin said tartly.
Golophin studied his friend and former pupil for a while in silence. He had become a gaunt shade of a man, the bones of his face standing out under the skin, his eyes sunk in deep orbits, the flesh around them dark as the skin of a grape. His head had been shaven down to the scalp to rid him of the vermin which infested it, and it gave him the air of a sinister convict. The wholesome, hale-looking soldier-mage Golophin had once known seemed to have fled without a trace.
“You touched my mind once,” the old mage said quietly. “I was scanning the west on the chance I might find some trace of you, and I heard you cry out for help.”
Bardolin stared into the fire. “We were at sea, I think. I felt you. But then he came along and broke the connection.”
“He is a remarkable man, if man is indeed the word.”
“I don’t know what he is, Golophin. Something new, as I am. His immortality has something to do with the black change, as has his power. I am beginning to fathom it all. Here in the Old World we always thought that a shifter could not master any of the other six Disciplines-the beast disrupted some necessary harmony in the soul. But now I think differently. The beast, once mastered, can lead one to the most intimate understanding of the Dweomer possible. A shifter is in essence a conjured animal, a creature owing its existence entirely to some force outside the normal laws of the universe. When a man becomes a lycanthrope, he becomes, if you like, a thing of pure magic, and if he has the will then it is all there waiting for him. All that power.”
“You almost sound as though you accept your fate.”
“Hawkwood brought me here thinking you could cure me. We both know you cannot. And perhaps I do not want to be cured any more. Golophin, have you thought of that? This Aruan is incredibly powerful. I could be too. All I need is time, time to think and research.”
“This tower and everything in it is at your disposal, Bard, you know that.”
“Thank you.”
“But I have one question. When you unlock this reservoir of power, if you ever do, what will you do with it? Aruan is intent on establishing himself in the Old World, perhaps not tomorrow or this month or even this year, but soon. He intends some kind of sorcerous hegemony. He’s been working towards it for centuries, from what you tell me. When that day comes, then it will be the ordinary kings and soldiers of the world versus him and his kind. Our kind. Where do the lines get drawn?”
Bardolin would not look at him. “I don’t know. He has a point, don’t you think? For centuries we’ve been persecuted, tortured, murdered because of the gift we were born with. It is time it was stopped. The Dweomer-folk have a right to live in peace.”
“I agree. But starting a war is not the way to secure that right. It will make the ordinary folk of the world more fearful of us than ever.”
“It is time the ordinary folk of the world were made to regret their blind bigotry,” Bardolin snarled, and there was such genuine menace in his voice that Golophin, startled, could think of nothing more to say.
Hawkwood had not ridden a horse for longer than he could remember. Luckily, the animal he had hired seemed to know more about it than he did. He bumped along in a state of weary discomfort, his destination visible as a grey finger of stone shimmering in the spring haze above the hills to the north. There was another rider on the road ahead, a woman by the looks of things. Her mount was lame. Even as he watched, she dismounted and began inspecting its hooves one by one. He drew level and reined in, some battered old remnant of courtesy surfacing.
“Can I help?”
The woman was well-dressed, a tall, plain girl in her late twenties with a long nose and a wondrous head of fiery hair that caught the sunshine.
“I doubt it,” and she went back to examining her horse.
His appearance was against him, Hawkwood knew. Though he had bathed and changed and suffered a haircut at the hands of Donna Ponera, Galliardo’s formidable wife, he still looked like some spruced-up vagabond.
“Have you far to go?” he tried again.
“He’s thrown a shoe. God’s blood. Is there a smithy hereabouts?”
“I don’t know. Where are you heading for?”
The girl straightened. “Not far. Yonder tower.” She gave Hawkwood a swift, unimpressed appraisal. “I have a pistol. You’ll find easier pickings elsewhere.”
Hawkwood laughed. “I’ll bet I would. It so happens I also am going to the tower. You know the Mage Golophin then?”
“Perhaps.” She looked him over with more curiosity now. He liked the frankness of her stare, the strength he saw in her features. Not much beauty there, in the conventional sense, but definite character. “My name is Hawkwood,” he said.