Barbara Hambly - A Night with the Girls

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A Night with the Girls

Barbara Hambly

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"What's the problem?" Starhawk of Wrynde swung down from her horse in front of Butchers

infirmary tent. Though she hadn't been in a mercenary camp in almost two years, she had a

soul-deep sense of familiarity about the place, like the outhouse behind a familiar tavern: Are

we back here again? Only the outhouse would have been quieter. Past the walls of Horran, the

sun dipped toward the Inner Sea, red behind the squat black towers of siege engines. In front of

tents the meres sharpened swords and polished armor, repaired straps, chatted up the camp

whores, or diced. Cook-fire smoke gritted in the eyes, profanity in the ears.

Be it ever so humble…

Butcher craned to look past Starhawk's shoulder. "Where's the Wolf?"

"And I'm so glad to see you, too," replied Starhawk.

The troop physician laughed, embarassed. "I'm sorry." She made a show of checking her

breeches pockets and the leathern purse at her belt. "I must have left my manners in my other

clothes. I'm damn glad to see you, Hawk, but I meant it in my letter when I said we needed Sun

Wolf here."

"Sun Wolfs in the mountains, chasing down some woman who's supposed to be teaching

magic." Starhawk ran the horse's reins through the ropes that wrapped one of the barrels piled

outside the hospital tent, and pulled down her saddlebags. "Don't tell me you've got another

wizard in the city." Two years ago the troop, of which Starhawk had once been second in

command, had the misfortune to have a curse placed on it during a siege. The results had not

been pleasant for anyone.

Butcher scratched her short-cropped graying hair, and led the way into the tent. Inside, her

two apprentices were closing the flaps and lighting lamps. A slave came past with dishes of

porridge on a tray. A couple of meres from one of the smaller troops, as well as those of

Captain Ari's army, were sitting up in their cots; but nobody who looked like soldiers of the

Prince of Chare, who'd hired them. Elsewhere a man muttered in drugged pain. Here on the

Gwarl Peninsula, where the trade-routes ran from Ciselfarge and points east, there was plenty

of access to opium.

"I don't think it's a wizard." The physician led the way through the aisle of cots to a

curtained-off rear corner of the tent. "But sure as pox there's something going on. Take a look at

this."

An enormous woman rose from beside the cot as Butcher led the Hawk through the curtains.

Starhawk nodded a greeting.

"Battlesow here found him," explained Butcher. "They were on watch together, night before

last. They usually watched together." She brought the hanging lamp down close, and twitched

the sheet back.

Starhawk said, "Mother Pusbucket!" and stepped away.

"We don't know what did that." Battlesow had a small girl's sweet, lisping voice, faintly

absurd in most circumstances. It was hard with anger now. "He was lying with his back against

the roots of an oak-tree, with his sword in one hand and his dagger in the other."

"I have them in the other room." Butcher stepped forward, covered over the scabbed and

puckered horror again. "We cleaned him up-he was still breathing-" Starhawk shuddered at the

thought. "-But there was blood all over the weapons, old blood, like you find in week-old

corpses. You've seen some weird things, since you and Sun Wolf left the troop and started

mucking around with wizardry. You ever seen anything like that?"

"Sure." The Hawk gazed down at the outline of the distorted face, the sticky rings of

dabbled blood visible beneath the sheet. "Last time I saw the bottom of a boat that had been

bored through by worms. But those holes were the size of my finger, not my wrist."

"I've been asking." Butcher led the way along what had probably been a farm-path. The

sheathed glow of her lantern bobbed on charred tree-stumps, burned and ruined hedges, and

here and there the smashed-in ruins of a house or a barn. Horran was a prosperous little trading

port, Starhawk recalled from her own mercenary days, the major source of income for the

Prince of Chare. She'd heard in Kedwyr that the Prince had recently hired Ari of Wrynde-Sun

Wolfs successor to the command of the troop-to help convince the Horran town fathers not to

declare independence. These, she guessed, would have been the garden farms that supplied the

city dwellers with fresh vegetables and milk. The Mother only knew where their owners were.

Probably sitting in the hills waiting to see who would win.

"According to latrine rumor, five outpost guards have disappeared in the past eight days,"

Butcher went on. "This morning I made a little tour of the perimeter-nearly getting shot by both

sides for my trouble-and found three bodies in the cellar of a farmhouse. They were too

chewed-up for me to tell much. Rats, mostly, but some of the wounds didn't look like rats, or

like any animal I've ever seen. They were jammed up under the floor-joists."

"That where we're going now?" Starhawk had her sword in her hand, watching all around

her, only half listening to what Butcher said, and to the heavy scrunch of Battlesow's boots on

the path behind her. It would help a lot, she reflected, if she knew what she was listening for.

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