Brotherhood of the Wolf Part 38

Myrrima had taken endowments from her mother and sisters. At her mother's bidding, she had taken her mother's wit. At her sisters' bidding, she had taken their glamour, all so that she could make a good marriage and provide for them well.

Yet the fruit of her deeds tasted bitter.

Myrrima knew that what she'd done was evil, and now she sat prepared to repeat her deed. But while some evil acts became easier with repet.i.tion, some became more impossible.

The pup was innocent, staring up at her with big, brown, loving eyes. She knew the pain that the pup was about to endure, knew that she would hurt it grievously, withdraw its stamina for no better reason than that it loved her, that it had been born with a disposition that would allow it to love her and serve her. She stroked the pup, tried to comfort it. The pup licked her and softly nibbled her sleeve.

Myrrima had come alone to the facilitator's room in Duke Groverman's Dedicate's Keep. She'd come alone because Iome was tired and had sought a bed. She'd come alone because even though all the knights in Heredon cheered her, she felt ashamed of what she had to do.

Duke Groverman's chief facilitator was a small fellow, an old man with wizened eyes and a white beard that nearly fell to his belly.

He studied the forcible she provided carefully before he put it to use. The forcible looked like a small branding iron in shape. One long end served as a handle, while the shape of the rune at the other end determined which attribute would be magically transferred from a Dedicate to his or her lord.

The facilitator's art was an ancient practice, one that required only a small level of magical skill, but great study. Now the facilitator took the forcible for stamina, studied the rune made of blood metal at its end. Using a tiny rattail file, he carefully began to shave off bits of blood metal, resting the forcible over a pan so that he could capture every precious flake of metal for reuse.

"Blood metal is soft and easily damaged," the facilitator said. "This should have been transported with greater care."

Myrrima only nodded. The d.a.m.ned thing had been carried thousands of miles since its forging. She did not wonder that it was a little dented. Yet she knew that if the facilitator had to, he could melt the forcible down and cast it again.

"Still, it is a good design," the facilitator muttered rea.s.suringly. "Pimis Sucharet of Dharmad forged this forcible, and his work shows his genius."

Rarely had Myrrima heard anyone compliment a man of Indhopal. The nations had been too long at war.

"Hold the pup tight, now," the facilitator said. "Don't let it move."

Myrrima held the pup as the facilitator pressed the forcible to its flesh, began his chants, his voice piping high and birdlike.

In moments the forcible began to glow white-hot, and the smell of burning hair and flesh filled the air. The pup yelped desperately in pain, and Myrrima pinched its legs together and held them so that it could not run or squirm. The pup nipped her as it sought to escape, and Myrrima whispered, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

In that second, the forcible blazed white-hot, and the pup howled in torment Myrrima's other three pups were wandering about the floor of the keep, sniffing at carpets and mopping the floor with their tongues in search of tidbits. But as this pup howled, one of the others rushed to Myrrima's side and began barking, staring up at the facilitator, as if unsure whether to attack.

The facilitator withdrew the forcible, inspected the glowing thing. He weaved the forcible through the air, and ribbons of light hung there, as if painted in the smoky ak. He stared at the bands of light for a long moment, as if judging their thickness and width.

Then, satisfied, he came to Myrrima's side. She pulled her riding pants up so that the facilitator could place the brand just above her knee, where it would seldom be seen beneath her clothes The white-hot forcible seared her skin, even as the facilitator drove the blood metal into her flesh.

But even as it burned, Myrrima found herself in ecstasy. The sense of vitality that suddenly flooded into her, the invigoration, were overwhelming.

Myrrima had never taken an endowment of stamina before, had not quite imagined how satisfying it would be. She suddenly found herself covered in sweat. The sweetness of the whole experience overwhelmed her. As she struggled to reckon with her euphoria, she glanced down at the pup in her arms.

It lay there looking haggard.

Moments before, the pup's eyes had been bright with excitement. Now they appeared dull. If she'd seen the pup with a litter, she'd have thought it sickly, a runt. She would have suggested that someone drown it, release it from its misery.

"I'll take that one to the kennels, now that you're done," the facilitator said.

"No," Myrrima said, knowing that she sounded foolish. "I'm not done with it. Let me pet it for a minute."

The pup would be giving her so much, she wanted to give it something in return, not just abandon it to another's care.

"Don't worry," the facilitator a.s.sured her. "The children at the kennels are good with the dogs. They'll give it more than a few sc.r.a.ps of meat. They'll love it as if it were their own, and the pup, will hardly miss the stamina you've taken today."

Myrrima's mind felt numb. With her stamina, she would be able to practice longer with her bow, become a better warrior, faster. By taking this guilt upon her, she hoped to help her people.

"I'll hold it," she said, and put a hand under the pup's white chin and held it for a moment, stroking it.

"That pup at your feet, the one that barked at me, it's ready, too," the facilitator said. "Will you take the endowment now?"

She glanced down at the pup in question. It wagged its tail and gazed up at her hopefully. This was the pup with the strong nose. "Yes, I'll do it now."

When Myrrima took the endowment of scent, the world changed.

One moment, she sat in the chair with the pups, and then it was as if a veil dropped away.

The aroma of burning hair that had filled the room suddenly became more pungent, overwhelming, as it mingled with the scents of candle wax and dust and plaster and the pennyroyal flowers that had lain for a week upon the floor of the tower. She nuzzled a pup, could even smell its warmth.

The whole world seemed new.

With one pup's stamina to increase her energy reserves, Myrrima felt completely invigorated and awake. With another pup's endowment to heighten her sense of smell, the world seemed...remade, when she walked down from the keep.

The odor of horses blowing from the stables was overwhelming, and the smell of fresh-cooked beef in the bailey outside the Duke's Keep made her mouth water.

Yet it was people that thrilled her. She left her pups with the facilitator and walked down into the bailey, where the cooking fires had been guttering only half an hour before. Gaborn had made sure that the fires were doused before he spoke openly of fighting Raj Ahten.

Now Myrrima walked in darkness among the warriors, many of whom sat cross-legged on the ground to eat or lay on the ground on blankets.

Each warrior held such a fascinating combination of scents: the oiled metal armor, the greasy scent of wool, the mixture of soils and horses and food stains and spices and soaps and blood and the men's own natural body oils and urine.

Every scent came to her a hundred times more powerfully than she'd ever smelled it before. Many scents were completely new and alien, scents that were far too subtle for the human nose to recognize: the smell of gra.s.ses that had brushed against men's cloaks or of their ivory b.u.t.tons and the dyes in their cloth or on their leather fastenings. She found that dark hair smelled different from light, and that upon a man's skin she could often smell the food he had eaten earlier in the day. Thousands of new and subtle scents lay ready to he tasted The men in the bailey somehow seemed more tantalizing than before.

I am a wolf lord now, she thought. I walk among men, and no one sees the change in me. But I was blind, and now I see. I was blind, just as all those around me are blind.

With little effort, she would learn to smell those around her, so that she could hunt a man by scent, or recognize someone in the dark. The knowledge gave her a wild and heady sense of power, made her feel a little less vulnerable at the thought of going to war.

Alone, in the dark, Myrrima climbed a tower up onto the wall-walk above the Duke's Keep and stared out over the plains.

Desperately, she wanted to share this wondrous feeling with someone, and her thoughts turned to Borenson, riding on his errand far to the south.

She feared for him, so far away. Down in the bailey, some warriors who either had high stamina, and thus did not need sleep, or who were too excited to sleep, began to sing war songs, promising to slay their foes and give the Earth a taste of blood.

The night was chilly. Myrrima wished for Borenson's arms around her. She placed her right hand above her womb and stood sniffing the night air, waiting for moonrise.

CHAPTER 32.

CROWS GATHER.

Roland trudged up the circular stairs of a dank guard tower where the fog was so thick that it seemed to have snuffed out every second torch. Roland imagined that he'd be hours on the walls of Carris, searching for towers fifty-one and fifty-two in such fog.

He'd taken over an hour to find the armory, only to discover that with the thousands of men who'd come before him, there was no shirt of mail left that would fit a man his size, not even an aged cuira.s.s of boiled leather. All he got for his pains was a small horseman's shield filed to a sharp point on one side and a silly leather cap.

The walls of Carris rose twelve stories above the plain. The castle was an old keep, enormous. In ancient times, a duke from this realm had become betrothed to a princess of Muttaya, but when the woman had tried to cross a particularly treacherous portion of the Dove's Pa.s.s, the mule that carried her had lost its footing, so that she plunged to her death.

The King of Muttaya was an elderly ruler, and of course did what his custom dictated was right. He waited a year, the proper grieving time, and then sent a replacement, one of the princess's many younger sisters.

But over the intervening year the Duke had taken a fancy to a darkeyed lady from Seward. He married her before the replacement bride ever crossed the mountains. When the Muttayin Princess did arrive, the Duke sent her home.

Some of the Duke's counselors claimed afterward that he had never known that a replacement bride was coming, and that he erred only because he did not know Muttayin customs. But most historians in the House of Understanding were quite certain that the Duke feigned ignorance in order to placate his new bride.

The rejection of his daughter infuriated the King of Muttaya. He'd hoped to unite the two realms and had paid a vast fortune as a dowry. Feeling cheated, he went to the kaifs of his land and demanded to know what to do.

The kaifs said that, according to ancient law, any man found guilty of theft had one of two options: he could either restore what he had taken three times over, or lose his right hand.

So the King of Muttaya sent three kaifs and his dark-skinned daughter back over the mountains and gave the Duke three options. He offered to let the Duke take the princess as a second wife and then disavow the lady of Seward so that he could rightfully elevate the Muttayin Princess to the status of first wife. In the King's mind, this would have rectified the whole situation, and seemed the only plausible solution.

Or the Duke could either return an amount equal to triple the dowry, which would be an apology, or send back to Muttaya his own right hand, thus admitting that he was a thief.

The whole dilemma thus presented to the Duke was quite serious. No lord of Rofehavan would dare marry two women, or turn out a wife who was now heavy with child. Nor did the Duke have the money to pay triple the dowry. But it so happened that on that very afternoon, one of the Duke's young guardsmen lost his right hand in a dueling accident.

To placate the kaifs, the Duke called his torturer to his quarters and faked an session of mayhem. He wrapped a b.l.o.o.d.y bandage around his right arm as if the hand had been removed, then he placed his own signet ring on the finger of the guard's severed hand and gave it to the kaifs.

The deed astonished and saddened the kaifs, for they thought that surely he would marry the fair young Princess, or at least pay triple the dowry. Instead, they returned to Muttaya with nothing but a severed hand as an admission of the Duke's theft.

For two years the ruse worked. The King of Muttaya seemed to be appeased.

Until a trader from Muttaya spotted the Duke at the Courts of Tide, somehow having regrown his severed hand.

The resulting war was called the Dark Lady War, named for the dark-skinned lady of Muttaya and the dark-eyed lady of Seward.

The war raged for three hundred years, sometimes skipping a generation without much fighting, only to burst into flame anew.

A dozen times the kings of Muttaya overtook western Mystarria, and often managed to settle there. But eventually the commoners would overthrow them, or the kings of Rofehavan would unite against them.

So it was that castle after castle was built in western Mystarria, and time and again they were torn down. Sometimes the Muttayin built them, sometimes the Mystarrians built them--until the land justly earned the name The Ruins.

Then Lord Carris came along. Over a period of forty years he managed to hold the realm against the Muttayin while he gathered enough stone to build his great walled city, which the Muttayin were never able to conquer.

Lord Carris died peacefully in his sleep at the ripe old age of a hundred and four--a feat that had no precedent in the previous three hundred years.

That had been nearly two thousand years ago, and Carris still stood, the single greatest fortress in Western Mystarria and the lynchpin that held the west together.

The walled city covered an island in Lake Donnestgree, so that most of the walls could not be breached except by boat. Since Muttaya was landlocked, the Muttayan were poor hands with boats. But even boats could not avail much when the castle walls themselves rose a hundred feet on the side, straight up from the water.

The stone walls had been covered with plaster and lime, so a man attempting an escalade could not find a toehold.

From atop the walls, commoners could shoot arrows down. through the kill holes or lob stones onto any boat. It therefore did not take force soldiers with great endowments to man most of Carris's walls. Instead, those who sought to a.s.sail Carris had one of three options. They could try to infiltrate the castle and overthrow it from within, they could set a siege, or they could opt for a frontal a.s.sault, trying to win through the three barbicans into the fortress proper.

The castle had fallen only four times in history. Many castles in Rofehavan had thicker and higher walls or more artillery engines, but few castles were more strategically situated.

Roland climbed the stairs eight stories through a dank guard tower until he reached the top. There a steward with a key unlocked the heavy iron door that led upstairs to the top of the wall.

Roland had expected the fog to be so thick that he'd spend hours looking for his post. But as he neared the top of the wall, he found that the fog receded and he actually saw the last rays of the evening sun before it dropped over the western hills.

When he reached the crenellated wall he elbowed his way forward through the throng of warriors who sat ten deep along the wall-walks. Huge stones and stacks of arrows were piled up everywhere along the walls. Commoners lay asleep in the lee of the crenellations with nothing more than thin blankets pulled over them.

Roland trudged along the wall, past tower after tower, until he reached the baker's tower. The yeasty scent of bread rose from it. The tower was so warm that men thronged to sleep atop it in the cold evening.

Roland could not tiptoe through the press, so he just walked across the men's bodies, ignoring the shouts and curses that followed him.

Past the tower, peasants were hoisting up good food, lamb roast and bread loaves and fresh-pressed cider--and dispensing them to the troops. As the men ate, Roland had to avoid knocking over their mugs and stepping on plates.

Roland continued to thread a precarious path through the crowd, grabbing a loaf of bread and slicing it open, then throwing his lamb atop it so that the bread acted as a plate. A chill wind blew here atop the wall, and gulls hovered on the wind above, eyeing his food hungrily. He wished that he'd not given his thick bearskin robe to the green woman.

He wondered where she was now, wondered if Averan would fare well tonight.

He found his post on the south wall, and there spotted Baron Poll easily enough. Since Carris sat on a lake, and this particular wall faced the waters, no h.o.a.rdings had been erected between these towers to protect the castle from bombardment. The fat Baron had climbed atop a merlon and sat with his legs dangling over, looking like some glum gargoyle.

Roland would never have dared hang from the wall like that His fear of heights was such that it made his heart race just to watch a friend sit in that precarious position.

Wisps of fog reached right up to Baron Poll's feet.

Everywhere out around him the crows and pigeons were flapping about in the upper fog.

When Roland approached, the Baron glimpsed him from, the corner of his eye, and his demeanor brightened. He smiled joyfully. "Ah, Roland, my friend, you made it alive after all! I thought Raj Ahten's men would be using your skull for a drinking cup by now."

"Not likely," Roland said with a grin. "They nearly had me, till they saw that my brain was the size of a hazelnut. I guess they figured my skull couldn't hold enough to make a decent mug. They ran off and left me alone in the woods while they hunted for you."

"Then where have you been all day?" the Baron asked in astonishment.

"Wandering down in the fog," Roland answered.

The Baron glanced down at the mist curling just under his toes. He spat over the castle wall. "Aye, a man can't find himself to pee in this fog. I made my way to the castle well enough, but it helps that I'd lived here half of my life, and so knew the way."

Roland stood beside the Baron, looked out at the birds.

"So, we're way up here with the birds. Looks as if they don't dare find a place to roost."

"Crows," Baron Poll said with a wise look. He'd been right. The crows knew where to hunt for food, and they knew that a battle was coming.

Baron Poll glanced over his shoulder, up to a tower in the central keep, higher than any other except the Duke's Keep--the graak's tower. Dozens of vultures roosted there.

Roland looked out over the mist wondering how a fog that was so low to the ground could have been so thick. He set his small shield down on a merlon, as if it were some huge curved platter, then placed his mug and his loaf with meat on it, and began to dine. He felt guilty eating such a fine meal when Averan had complained of hunger this morning. Likely the girl would go hungry again tonight. Roland's own stomach had been cramping as he walked through the fog, but suddenly he remembered that he'd picked some walnuts for Averan and then forgotten them while evading Raj Ahten's troops. He reached into his pocket and took those with his meal.

He stared across the darkening landscape. He could still see three bluish clouds out there on the downs, but they had moved closer to Carris, and now were but five and a half miles away.