Barbara Hambly - The Ladies of Mandrigyn

What in the name of the Cold Hells is this? Sun Wolf held the scrap of unfolded paper between stubby fingers that were still slightly stained with blood.

Starhawk, his tall, rawboned second-in-command, glanced up from cleaning the grime of battle off the hilt of her sword and raised dark, level brows inquiringly. Outside, torchlight reddened the windy night. The camp was riotous with the noise of victory; the mercenaries of Wrynde and the troops of the City of Kedwyr were uninhibitedly celebrating the final breaking of the siege of Melplith.

Whats it look like? she asked reasonably.

It looks like a poxy proposition. He handed it to her, the amber light of the oil lamp overhead falling over his body, naked to the waist and glittering with a light curly rug of gold hair. Starhawk had been fighting under his command for long enough to know that, if he had actually thought it nothing more than a proposition, he would have put it in the fire without a word.

Sun Wolf, Commander of the Mercenaries, Camp of Kedwyr below the walls of Melplith, from Sheera Galernas of Mandrigyn, greetings. I will be coming to you in your tent tonight with a matter of interest to you. For my sake and that of my cause, please be alone, and speak to no one of this. Sheera.

Womans handwriting, Starhawk commented, and ran her thumb consideringly along the gilt edge of the expensive paper.

Sun Wolf looked at her sharply from beneath his curiously tufted brows. If she wasnt from Mandrigyn, Id say it was the local madam trying to drum up business.

Starhawk nodded in absent-minded agreement.

Outside the tent, the noise scaled up into a crescendo. Boozy catcalls mixed with cries of encouragement and yells of Kill him! Kill the bastard! Between the regular troops of the City of Kedwyr and the Citys Outland Militia Levies, a lively hatred existed, perhaps stronger than the feeling that either body of warriors had toward the hapless citizen-soldiers of the besieged town of Melplith. It was a conflict that the Wolf and his mercenaries had stayed well clear off the Wolf because he made it his policy never to get involved in local politics, and his men because of a blood-chilling directive from their captain on the subject. The noises of drunken murder did not concern himthere wasnt a man in his troop who would have so much as stayed to watch.

Mandrigyn, Starhawk said thoughtfully. Altiokis conquered that city last spring, didnt he?

Sun Wolf nodded and settled himself into a fantastic camp chair made of staghorn bound with gold, looted from some tribal king in the far northeast. Most of the big tents furnishings had been plundered from somewhere or other. The peacock hangings that separated it into two rooms had once adorned the bedroom of a prince of the KChin Desert. The cups of translucent, jade-green lacquer and gold had belonged to a merchant on the Bight Coast. The graceful ebony table, its delicate inlays almost hidden under the bloody armor that had been dumped upon it, had once graced the wine room of a gentlemanly noble of the Middle Kingdoms, before his precious vintages had been swilled by the invading armies of his enemies and he himself had been dispatched beyond such concerns.

The city went fast, Sun Wolf remarked, picking up a rag and setting to work cleaning his own weapons. Basically, it was the same situation as we had here in Melplithfactional splits in the parliament, scandal involving the royal familythey have a royal family there, or they did have, anywaythe city weakened by internal fighting before Altiokis marched down the pass. Im told there were people there who welcomed him as a liberator.

Starhawk shrugged. No weirder than some of the things the Trinitarian heretics believe, she joked, deadpan, and he grinned. Like most northerners, the Hawk held to the Old Faith against the more sophisticated theologies of the Triple God.

The Wizard Kings Citadel has been on Mandrigyns back doorstep for a hundred and fifty years, the, Wolf continued after a moment. Last year they signed some kind of treaty with him. I could see it coming even then.

Starhawk shoved her sword back into its sheath and wiped her fingers on a rag. Sun Wolfs talent for collecting and sorting information was uncanny, but it was a skill that served him well. He had a knack for gathering rumors, extrapolating political probabilities from crop prices and currency fluctuations and the most trivial bits of information that made their way north to his broken-down stronghold at the old administrative town of Wrynde. Thus he and his men had been on the spot in the Gwarl Peninsula when the fighting had broken out between the trading rivals of Kedwyr and Melplith. Kedwyr had hired the Wolf and his troop at an astronomical sum.

It didnt always work that wayin her eight years as a mercenary in Sun Wolfs troop, Starhawk had seen one or two spectacular pieces of mistimingbut on the whole it had enabled the Wolf to maintain his troops in better-than-average style, fighting in the summer and sitting out the violence of the winter storms in the relative comfort of the half-ruined town of Wrynde.

Like all mercenary troops. Sun Wolfs shifted from year to year in size and composition, though they centered around a hard core that had been with him for years. As far as Starhawk knew, Sun Wolf was the only mercenary captain who operated a regular school of combat in the winter months. The school itself was renowned throughout the West and the North for the excellence of its fighters. Every winter, when the rains made war impossible, young men and occasional young women made the perilous journey through the northern wastelands that had once been the agricultural heart of the old Empire of Gwenth to the ruined and isolated little town of Wrynde, there to ask to be taught the hard arts of war.

There were always wars to fight somewhere. Since the moribund Empire of Gwenth had finally been riven apart by the conflict between the Three Gods and the One, there had always been warsover the small bits of good land among the immense tracts of bad, over the trade with the East in silk and amber and spices, over religion, or over nothing. Starhawk, whose early training had given her a taste for such things, had once explained the theology behind the Schism to the Wolf. Being a barbarian from the far north, he worshipped the spirits of his ancestors and would cheerfully take money from proponents of either faith. An understanding of the situation had only amused him, as she knew it would. Lately the wars had been over the rising of the Wizard King Altiokis, who was expanding his own empire from the dark Citadel of Grimscarp, engulfing the Thanes who ruled the countryside and such cities as Mandrigyn.

Will you see this woman from Mandrigyn? she asked.

Probably. The noise of the fight outside peaked in a crazy climax of yelling, punctuated by the heavy crack of the whips of the Kedwyr military police. It was the fourth fight theyd heard since returning to the camp after the sacking of the town was done; victory was headier than any booze ever brewed.

Starhawk collected her gearsword, dagger, mail shirtpreparatory to returning to her own tent. Melplith stood on high ground, above its sheltered bayone of those arid regions whose chief crops of citrus and olives had naturally turned its inhabitants to trade for their living. Chill winds now blew up from the choppy waters of the bay, making the lamp flame flicker in its topaz glass and chilling her flesh through the damp cotton of her dark, embroidered shirt.

You think its a job?

I think shell offer me one.

Will you take it?

The Wolf glanced over at her briefly. His eyes, in this light, were pale gold, tike the wines of the Middle Kingdoms, He was close to forty, and his tawny hair was thinning, but there was no gray either in it or in the ragged mustache that drooped like a clump of yellow-brown winter weeds from the underside of a craggy and much-bent nose. The power and thickness of his chest and shoulders made him seem taller than his six feet when he was standing up; seated and at rest, he reminded her of a big, dusty lion. Would you go against Altiokis? he asked her.