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

serviceable skirts, quilted bodices, and light boots. For a time none of them spoke, but they watched him, lined behind Sheera like acolytes behind a priestess at a rite.
    One of them was the amber-eyed girl, he saw, her delicate, curiously secretive face downcast and afraid and—what! Ashamed! Why ashamed!? The rose-tinted memory of her room in Kedwyr slid through his mind, with the warmth of her scented flesh twined with his. She was clearly a professional, for all her youth . . . Why ashamed! But he was too tired to wonder, and the thought slipped away.
    The woman beside her was as pretty, but in a different way—certainly not professional, at least not about that. She was as tiny and fragile as a porcelain doll, her moonlight-blond hair caught in a loose knot at the back of her head, her sea-blue eyes marked at the corners with the faint lines of living and grief. He wondered what she was doing in the company of a hellcat like Sheera . . . in the company of any of those others, for that matter.
    Neither of the other two women had or would even make the pretense of beauty. They were both tall, the younger of them nearly Sun Wolf’s own height—a broad-shouldered, hard-muscled girl who reminded him of the women in his own troops. She was dressed like a man in leather breeches and an embroidered shirt, and her shaven skull was brown from exposure to the sun. So was her face, brown as wood and scarred from weapons, like that of a gladiator. After a moment’s thought, Sun Wolf supposed she must be one.
    The last woman stood in the shadows, having sought them with an almost unthinking instinct. The shadows did nothing to mask the fact that she was the ugliest woman Sun Wolf had ever laid eyes on—middle-aged, hook-nosed, her mouth distorted by the brown smear of a birthmark that ran like mud down onto her jutting chin. Her eyes, beneath a single black bar of brow, were as green, as cold, and as hard as jade, infused with the bitter strength of a woman who had been reviled from birth.
    They looked from him to Sheera, and on Sheera their eyes remained.
    Though he was almost too tired to speak, Sun Wolf asked after a time, “You kidnap my men, too?” There was no strength in his voice; he saw them move slightly to listen. There was a gritty note to it, too, like a streak of rust on metal, that he knew had not been there before. An effect of the poison, maybe.
    Sheera’s back stiffened slightly with the sarcasm, but she replied steadily, “No. Only you.”
    He nodded. It was a slight gesture, but all he had strength for. “You going to pay me the whole ten thousand?”
    “When you’re done, yes.”
    “Hmm.”
    
     His eyes traveled over the women again, slowly. Part of his mind was struggling against this paralyzing helplessness, screaming to him that he had to find a means to think his way out of this, but the rest of him was too tired to care. “You realize it will take me a little longer to storm the mines single-handedly?”
    That stung her, and those full red lips tightened. The porcelain doll, as if quite against her will, grinned.
    “It won’t be just you,” Sheera said, her voice low and intense. “We’re bringing you back to Mandrigyn with us as a teacher—a teacher of the arts of war. We can raise our own strike force, release the prisoners in the mines, and free the city.”
    Sun Wolf regarded her for a moment from beneath half-lowered lids, reflecting to himself that here was a fanatic if ever he saw one—crazy, dangerous, and powerful. “And just whom for starters,” he inquired wearily, “are you planning on having in your strike force, if all the men of the city are working in the mines?”
    “Us,” she said. “The ladies of Mandrigyn.”
    He sighed and closed his eyes. “Don’t be stupid.”
    “What’s stupid about it?” she lashed at him. “Evidently your precious men can’t be bothered to risk themselves, even for ready cash. We aren’t going to sit down and let Altiokis