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

that they use all the time.”
    “Lack of imagination,” Gobaris said promptly, straightening up in a two-stage motion to favor the effect of the coming dampness on his lower back. “If one more man had tried to tell me the story about the City Trooper and the baby goat, I’d have strangled the life out of him before he’d got past ‘Once upon a time.’ What can I do for you, Hawk?”
    She spun him a tale of a missing soldier, watching his puffy, unshaven face closely, and saw nothing in the wide blue eyes but annoyance and concern that the man should be found before the rest of the troop left without him. He let his packing lie and took her down to the city hall, shouting down the regular guards there and opening without demur any door she asked to see the other side of. At the end, she shook her head in assumed disgust and sighed. “Well, that rules out trouble, anyway. He’ll be either sodden drunk or snugged up with some woman.” It took all her long self-discipline and all the inexpressive calm of years of barracks poker to hide the sick qualm of dread that rose in her and accept with equanimity the Outland Captain’s invitation to share a quart of ale at the nearest tavern.
    She was reviewing in her memory the other possible ways to enter the jail by stealth and search for other cells there when Gobaris asked, “Did your chief get back to the camp all right, then?”
    She frowned, resting her hands around the mug on the rather grimy surface of the tavern table. “Why would he not?”
    Gobaris sighed, shook his head, and rubbed at the pink, bristly rolls of his jaw. “I didn’t like it myself, for all that Ari’s a stout enough fighter. If the President had wanted to make trouble, he could have trapped the two of them in the town. It was dangerous, is all.”
    Starhawk leaned back in her chair and considered the fat man in the cold white light that came in through the open tavern front from the square. “You mean Ari was the only man he had with him?” she asked, playing for time.
    “Only one I saw.” He threw back his head, revealing a grayish crescent of dirty collar above the edge of his pink livery doublet, and drank deeply, then wiped his lips with an odd daintiness on the cuff of his sleeve. “He might have had others up the alley, mind, but none whom I saw.”
    “Which alley?” she asked in a voice of mild curiosity, turning her head to scan the half-empty square. No booths or other tavern fronts opened into that great expanse of checked white and black stone today—a rainsquall had already dappled the pavement, and the fleeting patches of white and blue of the sky were more and more obscured by threatening gray.
    “That one there.”
    
     He pointed. From this angle, it was little more than a shaded slot behind the keyhole turrets of an elaborately timbered inn front. “We were at that alehouse there, the Cock in Leather Breeches, waiting for your chief to get back. Then Ari came out of the alley, walked slap up to the bodyguard, and sent ’em off back to camp. I thought it wasn’t like the Wolf to be that careless, but nobody asked me my opinion.”
    “You knew it was Ari.”
    Gobaris looked surprised. “Of course it was Ari,” he said. “He was standing within a yard of me, wasn’t he? Facing the lamps of the inn.”
    Ari was waiting for Starhawk at Sun Wolf’s tent when she came back from the city. The camp was alive with the movement of departure, warriors calling curses and jokes back and forth to one another as they loaded pack beasts with their possessions and loot from the sacking of Melplith. Starhawk, being not by nature a looter, had very little to pack; she could have been ready to depart in half an hour, tent and all. Someone—probably Fawn—had begun to dismantle Sun Wolf’s possessions, and the big tent was a chaos of tumbled hangings, their iridescence shot with gold stitching, of disordered camp furniture and cushions, and of mail and weapons. In the midst of