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Authors: Barbara Hambly
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as they walked on together to the open ground where the engineering park stood.
The afternoon was fading to eerie, windless twilight against which the siege engines rose up like the monsters of antediluvian tales. Sun Wolf felt a pang of grief and of renewed anger at the Vorsal mage, remembering that Gadget was dead—Gadget who’d built those machines and others, who had fiddled with new inventions during the long winters in Wrynde, and taught the Wolf and anyone else who’d listen about mathematics and engineering and the tensile strengths of steel. His anger—and for that matter his grief—he knew to be unreasonable. They all lived by death. Anyone he knew in the troop could be gone tomorrow. But still, he would miss the little engineer, and the anger made him feel better about destroying the only other mage he’d ever found.
Three men in the steel-chain nooses of slaves were finishing up their work on a broken catapult; a man the Wolf recognized as one of Gadget’s former assistants was arguing with Zane the Golden, Ari’s chief lieutenant. “Look,” Zane was saying in that reasonable tone the Wolf remembered well, “I didn’t ask you how much top-quality iron costs. I didn’t ask you how the thing broke in the first place. There’s tragedy in every life; we all have to endure it and go on. But we’re going to attack those guys on that wall over there—you see that wall over there?—four days from now and it’ll really help if we have a catapult to shoot at them with.”
Ari grinned and strode across the open ground of the park toward them. The Wolf almost followed, then thought again and stayed where he was. It was Ari’s troop now. The fact that many of the men, like Dogbreath and the Little Thurg, still regarded him as their commander wouldn’t help Ari any, and it was better not even to put himself in a position where someone could turn to him to ask his support instead of the new Captain’s.
But watching them at a distance, something in his heart smiled and warmed at Zane gesturing extravagantly, like an actor posing for a statue of himself—vain as a peacock with his shoulder-length golden curls and that small, perfect nose that everyone accused him of wearing an iron nose-guard into battle to protect—and Ari, patiently smoothing the engineer’s ruffled temper. Ari, formerly something of a smartmouth, had evidently learned tact in the year he’d been in command. Starhawk had always been the diplomat—it was good to see that Ari was learning the other things besides leading men which command involved.
Something in him sighed and settled. It was good to be home.
Then behind him, in the shadow of one of the siege engines, movement snagged at the corner of his good eye.
Not a rat, though there were far too many of them about the camp, even in daylight. This was a furtive shadow, slipping into the vast gloom of the burned siege tower’s charred skeleton. It was growing dark; the park slaves were setting up torches at a careful distance from anything remotely combustible, the night-guards coming in under the command of a pink-faced, muscle-bound woman called Battlesow.
The spells of diversion he’d used on Ari he drew about him now. A slave busied himself with a suddenly stubborn lash on a torch-holder; a guard stubbed his toe and bent down to rub it as Sun Wolf ghosted past and melted into the tangled darkness of the tower.
Within, it was like an improbable house of cards—charred beams, broken boards, and burned struts, all leaning against one another in a crazy rattrap a sharp wind could bring down. Above him, a portion of the spiral stair to the top still dangled perilously, like clots of filth on a spider strand; skeletal black rafters made a broken lattice against dun sky. It smelled of ashes and burned flesh, as the inn had done. Only here, more than just one little boy had died.
A woman was moving around the ruined inner wall, a branch of something in her hand.
She was
The afternoon was fading to eerie, windless twilight against which the siege engines rose up like the monsters of antediluvian tales. Sun Wolf felt a pang of grief and of renewed anger at the Vorsal mage, remembering that Gadget was dead—Gadget who’d built those machines and others, who had fiddled with new inventions during the long winters in Wrynde, and taught the Wolf and anyone else who’d listen about mathematics and engineering and the tensile strengths of steel. His anger—and for that matter his grief—he knew to be unreasonable. They all lived by death. Anyone he knew in the troop could be gone tomorrow. But still, he would miss the little engineer, and the anger made him feel better about destroying the only other mage he’d ever found.
Three men in the steel-chain nooses of slaves were finishing up their work on a broken catapult; a man the Wolf recognized as one of Gadget’s former assistants was arguing with Zane the Golden, Ari’s chief lieutenant. “Look,” Zane was saying in that reasonable tone the Wolf remembered well, “I didn’t ask you how much top-quality iron costs. I didn’t ask you how the thing broke in the first place. There’s tragedy in every life; we all have to endure it and go on. But we’re going to attack those guys on that wall over there—you see that wall over there?—four days from now and it’ll really help if we have a catapult to shoot at them with.”
Ari grinned and strode across the open ground of the park toward them. The Wolf almost followed, then thought again and stayed where he was. It was Ari’s troop now. The fact that many of the men, like Dogbreath and the Little Thurg, still regarded him as their commander wouldn’t help Ari any, and it was better not even to put himself in a position where someone could turn to him to ask his support instead of the new Captain’s.
But watching them at a distance, something in his heart smiled and warmed at Zane gesturing extravagantly, like an actor posing for a statue of himself—vain as a peacock with his shoulder-length golden curls and that small, perfect nose that everyone accused him of wearing an iron nose-guard into battle to protect—and Ari, patiently smoothing the engineer’s ruffled temper. Ari, formerly something of a smartmouth, had evidently learned tact in the year he’d been in command. Starhawk had always been the diplomat—it was good to see that Ari was learning the other things besides leading men which command involved.
Something in him sighed and settled. It was good to be home.
Then behind him, in the shadow of one of the siege engines, movement snagged at the corner of his good eye.
Not a rat, though there were far too many of them about the camp, even in daylight. This was a furtive shadow, slipping into the vast gloom of the burned siege tower’s charred skeleton. It was growing dark; the park slaves were setting up torches at a careful distance from anything remotely combustible, the night-guards coming in under the command of a pink-faced, muscle-bound woman called Battlesow.
The spells of diversion he’d used on Ari he drew about him now. A slave busied himself with a suddenly stubborn lash on a torch-holder; a guard stubbed his toe and bent down to rub it as Sun Wolf ghosted past and melted into the tangled darkness of the tower.
Within, it was like an improbable house of cards—charred beams, broken boards, and burned struts, all leaning against one another in a crazy rattrap a sharp wind could bring down. Above him, a portion of the spiral stair to the top still dangled perilously, like clots of filth on a spider strand; skeletal black rafters made a broken lattice against dun sky. It smelled of ashes and burned flesh, as the inn had done. Only here, more than just one little boy had died.
A woman was moving around the ruined inner wall, a branch of something in her hand.
She was
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