Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page A

them so by going in with a large one.”
    But on the highroad from the camp to the city gates, she met a convoy of sturdy little pack donkeys and a troop of the Kedwyr City Guards, bearing the specified payment from the Council. Thin and morose, like a drooping black heron upon his cobby little Peninsular mare, Commander Breg hailed her. She drew her horse alongside his. “No trouble?” she asked, nodding toward the laden donkeys and the dark-clothed guards who led them.
    The commander made the single coughing noise that was the closest he ever came to a laugh. The day had turned cold with the streaming wind; he wore a black cloak and surcoat wound over the shining steel back-and-breast mail, and his face, framed in the metal of his helmet, was mottled with vermilion splotches of cold. “Our President came near to an apoplexy and took to his bed with grief over the amount of it,” he told her. “But a doctor was summoned—they say he will recover.”
    Starhawk laughed. “Ari and Penpusher are there waiting to go over it with you.”
    “Penpusher,” the commander said thoughtfully. “Is he that yak in chain mail who threw the defending captain off the tower at the storming of Melplith’s gates?”
    “Oh, yes,” Starhawk agreed. “He’s only like that in battle. As a treasurer, he’s untouchable.”
    “As a warrior,” the commander said, “he’s someone I would not much like to try and touch, either.” A spurt of wind tore at his cloak, fraying the horses’ manes into tangled clouds and crooning eerily through the broken lines of windbreak and stone. He glanced past Starhawk’s shoulder at the gray rim of the sea, visible beyond the distant cliffs. The sky there was densely piled with bruised-looking clouds. Over the whining of the wind, the waves could occasionally be heard, hammer like against the rocks.
    “Will you make it beyond the Gniss,” he asked, “before the river floods?”
    “If we get started tomorrow.”
    
     It was her way never to give anyone anything. She would not speak to a comparative stranger of her fears that they would not, in fact, reach the river in time for a safe crossing. It was midmorning; were it not for Sun Wolf’s disappearance, they would have been breaking camp already, to depart as soon as the money was counted. With the rapid rise of the Gniss, hours could be important. As the wind knifed through the thick sheepskin of her coat and stung the exposed flesh of her face, she wondered if the commander’s words were a chance remark or a veiled warning to take themselves off before it was too late.
    “By the way,” she asked, curvetting her horse away from the path of the little convoy, “where does Gobaris keep himself when he’s in town? Or has he left already?”
    The commander shook his head. “He’s still there, in the barracks behind the Town Hall square. It’s his last day in the town, though—he’s getting ready to go back to his farm and that wife he’s been telling us about all through the campaign.”
    “Thanks.” Starhawk grinned and raised her hand in farewell. Then she turned her horse’s head in the direction of the town and spurred to a canter through the cold, flying winds of the coming storms.
    She found Gobaris, round, pink, and slothful, packing his few belongings and the mail that no longer quite fitted him, in the section of barracks reserved by the Council for the Outland Levies during their service to the town. Few of them were left; this section of the barracks, allotted to the men of the levies, was mostly empty, the straw raked from the bunks and heaped on the stone floor ready to be hosed out, the cold drafts whistling through the leak-stained rafters. The walls were covered with mute and obscene testimony of the rivalry between the Outland Levies and the City Troops.
    “I don’t know which is worse,” she murmured, clicking her tongue thoughtfully, “the lack of imagination or the inability to spell a simple four-letter word