The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “Does he know how close the rains fire?” Sun Wolf rasped, appalled. “What the hell’s he been doing all summer? God’s Grandmother, the Hawk and I between us could take that town in two weeks with a troop of nuns and a performing dog act!”

  “It’s not that easy, Chief.” Dogbreath drew up his knees and wrapped his long arms around them, his simian brow puckered as he tried to marshal thoughts he was uncertain how—or if—to express. “I never believed in all that garf about hoodoos,” he continued after a moment. “I mean, yeah, I laid out a dozen summer nights watching for the fairies when I was a kid, and all I ever saw was the older kids canoodling in the woods. But now they say you—you’ve turned into some kind of hoodoo, and there might be others—wizards, witches—hoodoos who’ve been on the bunk all these years, coming out now Altiokis the Wizard-King isn’t around to snuff ’em. And damn if I know what to believe.”

  Through the open door, voices drifted up from the common room below the gallery, the innkeeper’s wife’s raised in exasperation above the chirping giggles of her assorted offspring. This close to the coming of the winter storms, few travelers were on the road. Sun Wolf guessed the woman wouldn’t have permitted her children into the common room in the busy season. By their voices, at least one of them was old enough to be made a slave, either as a pit-brat in the Wenshar silver mines, or—if pretty—he knew brothels that took boys and girls as young as eight.

  “It’s not just the usual bellyaching during a siege, Chief,” Dogbreath went on. “It’s not just soldiers’ luck or that kind of stupid thing. This is different. I can’t say how.” He slouched back against the wooden wall behind him and seemed to concentrate all his attention on plaiting and unplaiting the last three-inch tuft of hair at the end of his left braid as he spoke.

  “It isn’t just some of the arrows being warped, or the glue on the fletch rotting—it’s every motherless arrow you touch, and especially the one you use to try to pick off the guy who’s about to dump molten lead on your buddy. Motherlovin’ boxes of ’em that were fine in Wrynde. It isn’t just the food’s bad—it’s either tryin’ to climb out of the cask or it’s got this back-taste that you barely notice going down, but you notice it lots when it’s coming back up the other way half an hour before the sortie at dawn. I never seen so many roaches, chiggers, and ticks, and all the rats in the Middle Kingdoms have been living in the catapult ropes. And I’ll tell you something else—there’s not a cat in the camp anymore.

  “That’s how it started. Then the sapper tunnels started flooding. Tunnels where we’d checked the supports and didn’t see a worm or a splinter or so much as an ant—sorry, Chief, didn’t mean to mention ants—would collapse on us. One of ’em caught fire, and if you can figure out how that happened, I’ll give you a sweet. Then the horses would spook—first just in the lines at night, but these days they’ll do it in battle, or even riding back and forth to town—horses who were damn near foaled on a battlefield. We lost a dozen men including Gadget—you remember Gadget, the engineer?—when one of the ballistas collapsed. We still don’t know how that happened, but I was one of the guards on it the night before it packed in and I swear by the Queen of Hell’s corset nobody got near it.

  “There’s something going on there, Chief, and the troops are starting to spook.”

  Sun Wolf barely heard those last words. A wizard. Something inside him gave a great, excited bound, like a child who sees his father surreptitiously clearing another stall in the stables a week before his birthday feast. A wizard in Vorsal.

  For a year, since being banished from Mandrigyn, where his only potential teacher lived, he’d been seeking a master wizard, someone who had been trained in the use of those terrifying powers, someone who could train him. For a year he had traced rumors that led nowhere and run to earth every trail he could think of that might lead to another wizard, someone who could teach him what he was and what he could be. The last of those trails had ended in the dead city of Wenshar, in bloody shreds of black cloth and red hair and a staggering line of sticky red handprints leading away into dust-silted gloom.

  Across Dogbreath’s shoulder he met Starhawk’s eyes. But she said nothing, just sat at the table, silently shuffling and reshuffling the cards.

  His one eye flicked back to Dogbreath. “Why doesn’t Ari just pull out? Write it off as a lost cause, take his front money and get his rosy little backside up to Wrynde before the rains turn the badlands into a white-water death trap and strand his arse in the Middle Kingdoms for the winter?” Firecat and the Little Thurg, who’d scootched their chairs around to his bedside, looked down into their painted clay mugs and said nothing. “He did get front money, didn’t he?”

  “Well—not enough to buy food through the winter.”

  Sun Wolf cursed again, a comprehensive and hair-raising execration that included several generations of Ari’s descendants and all of his luckless ancestors.

  “It was some kind of a deal with the King-Council,” Dogbreath continued, unperturbed by his former commander’s eloquence. “Penpusher said...”

  “Penpusher should have goddam known better than to get you in a position you couldn’t get out of!” He made a furious gesture and gasped as his wounded shoulder and the cracked ribs he’d acquired in Wenshar added their mite to the discussion.

  “That’s just it, Chief,” said Dogbreath. “We can’t get out of it, not now. Without the money we’re gonna starve in Wrynde, if we make it that far and, if we don’t break Vorsal soon, we’re gonna get hit by the rains anyway and stranded. Yeah, Kwest Mralwe might feed us through the winter, or they might turn against us, but either way, by spring, Laedden or Dalwirin is gonna get in the act and send an army against us that we won’t be in any shape to fight. And anyhow,” he added quietly, “if there is a hoodoo holed up in Vorsal, we might none of us make it to spring.”

  Sun Wolf leaned back against the flattened and rather dirty hay pillow wadded behind him, his big arms folded, his one eyelid drooping low over the chill amber glitter of his eye. The winter storms were late already; the desert sandstorms had started weeks ago. In his bones, in the dim extended senses of wizardry and animal watchfulness, he could feel the weather, hear the moan of distant tempests whispering behind the wind as it shook the heavy window shutters. He studied them all—the thin brown man sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed in a messy welter of sleeve dags; the sturdy red-haired woman in the chair beside him, sipping her beer and watching his face anxiously; the Little Thurg, looking down at his blunt, folded hands; even the Hawk, seemingly absorbed in getting every card in the two halves of the divided pack to interleave exactly, one to one. He’d spent years with these people and knew them far better than any of the parade of lovely young concubines who had filed through his bed. He’d trained them to fight, crossed swords with them at the school he’d operated for so many years in Wrynde, and drunk with them after battles; he knew their flaws, their jokes, their loves, and the minutest timbres of their voices. The day before yesterday was far from the first time they’d saved his life, at the risk—and sometimes, as in Choirboy’s case, at the cost—of their own.

  For an instant everything was as it had been, and he understood that, as with Starhawk, he was still their commander in their hearts—and in his own.

  But there was magic now in his veins. And the man who could bring it forth, give him what his soul most craved, was in Vorsal, holding it against them.

  “You feel okay to sit a horse tomorrow?” Dogbreath went on, glancing up when the weight of the silence became oppressive. “It’s a week’s ride—five days if we push it...”

  He was expecting the Wolf to say, as he would have a year ago, So let’s push it. The Wolf still felt weak and tired, but he’d fought battles in worse shape. It was all so familiar, so easy, that he nearly made that automatic response. But after all, he thought, and said nothing. After a moment he saw that nothing change the expression in his friend’s face.

  “Chief?” It hadn’t even oc
curred to him, Sun Wolf thought, that he might say no.

  Because they trusted him. Trusted that he’d be there for them, to the cold gates of hell and beyond, as they were for him.

  He sighed. “Yeah. I’ll be ready to go in the morning.”

  Relief sprang into Firecat’s face and Thurg’s, like children when they can convince themselves after an overheard fight that their parents still love one another, that nothing has changed. Only the doubt lingered in Dogbreath’s troubled glance, as they filed out of the room to investigate the smells of roast pig that floated ever more insistently up from the common room below. As for Starhawk, rising last to follow them out the door, it had always been difficult to read her enigmatic gray eyes.

  A wizard in Vorsal.

  As a child, Sun Wolf had crept by night from the loft he’d shared with the household stores to steal through freezing darkness to the house of Many Voices, shaman of the village. The shaman’s house had a door which looked out onto the moor; he would crouch in the lichenous shelter of a fallen menhir and watch that dapper little man sorting his herbs, experimenting with smokes and incense, or sketching the Circles of Power in the dirt of the floor. His father had caught him at it and beaten him, more than once. Many Voices was a charlatan, his father had said, a faker whose curses were worthless unless backed with poison. Finally the big warrior, who had wanted a warrior son, had paid Many Voices to ill-wish a neighbor’s goats, and had sat out with his son most of one rainy night until they’d caught the shaman red-handed, mixing jimson with the goats’ feed.

  Sun Wolf, who’d been seven at the time, had never forgotten the searing blister of shame at his own credulity, nor his father’s uproarious laughter at his cheated, helpless rage. It had been the end of his conscious dreams of magic.

  Like his father—like most people in the days of Altiokis the Wizard-King’s century and a half of dominance—he had come to believe that magic was only sleight of hand or trickery and that the shadows of power and fire that haunted his own dreams were, in fact, nothing but the lurking seeds of madness. He had become what his father had wanted him to be and had been the best.

  And then the seeds had blossomed. Untaught magefire had broken forth within him like glowing magma from a shell of black volcanic stone, and with it the craving, the yearning to learn and understand.

  A wizard in Vorsal. A week’s ride—five days, if they pushed it. The strategist, the fighter, the commander his men knew and trusted, might turn ways and means over coolly in his mind, but the untaught mage—like the born musician who has never been allowed to lay hands on an instrument, or the natural artist who has only heard of paint—breathed faster at the thought. He’d found one, after all those barren months!

  The reflection of the firelight had changed against the common room’s ceiling, visible to him through the half-open door. The groaning of the wind about the walls waxed shriller as full darkness fell, and the dry restlessness of the air prickled his skin. Through the door and down in the commons he heard Dogbreath’s flexible bass voice ranging the hills and valleys of some tale he was spinning, broken by the braying delight of the Little Thurg’s laugh; closer, he caught the brief scatter of children’s voices as the innkeeper’s wife herded her brood up some backstair to the attics where they slept. Sun Wolf wondered if the inn stores were kept up there, and if those children woke in the night as he had done in his childhood to see the red eyes of rats reflecting the glow of the moon. Then a light creak of floorboards sounded in the gallery outside the door, a tread he identified as Starhawk’s in the same moment that he reached down with his unwounded arm to locate the sword he kept habitually by the bed. A dark form against the ruby-dyed rafters outside, a slip of brightness catching colorless hair; then she was inside. She disliked standing framed in doorways as much as she did sitting with her back to open space.

  The ability to see in pitch darkness had been one of the first things that had come to him with his wizard’s power. He watched her locate her bedroll by touch after closing the door, and spread the blankets soundlessly across the threshold. She unbuckled her swordbelt and laid it on the floor beside her, removed half a dozen daggers and a spiked knuckle-duster from various corners of her person, then folded herself neatly down to a sitting position to pull off her boots.

  “I’m not hurt that bad, dammit.”

  Her grin was fleet and shy even in the dark. “I was afraid of getting stabbed if I startled you awake.”

  “Come over here and I’ll stab you so you’ll never forget it.”

  She laughed softly, collected her weapons, and came to sit on the bed. Only when she reached down to locate its edge could he tell that she was almost totally unable to see in the dense gloom. The shutters might be opened an hour a day at this time of year to air the room, but against his shoulder he could feel through the wall that the outer air was freezing. With his good hand, he guided her face down to his, and they kissed, long and deep, in the darkness.

  She stripped quickly out of her jerkin and buckskin breeches, and awkwardly he turned back the blankets for her to crowd into the narrow space beside him.

  “I was scared for you,” she said after a time, her soft voice husky and hesitant. “I couldn’t let myself think about it then. I can’t ever, really. They’re right when they say falling in love is a bad idea. You get scared... I don’t want to lose you.”

  “I never did like bugs,” he rumbled, and pulled the blanket up to cover them both.

  She laughed softly, putting aside the memory of that fear, and said, “Then we’ve come to the wrong inn.”

  He was too weary and still in too much pain to feel much desire for her, but it was good only to lie together, to feel the warmth of that long bony body at his side, to hear her cool voice and see the faint shape of her delicate, broken nose outlined in the darkness.

  At length she asked him, “You going to kill that wizard in Vorsal?”

  Trust the Hawk, he thought, and sighed heavily. The question had been cruising, sharklike, beneath the surface of his own thoughts for hours. “I don’t know.”

  “You help the folks who are trying to sack his town and skrag his family and friends, I doubt he’ll feel like teaching you much, you know.” He could feel the steel in her light voice, like a finely made dagger flexing, and wished sometimes she wouldn’t put her finger so unerringly on his own thoughts.

  “I didn’t say I was going to help them.”

  “It’s what Ari’s asking,” she pointed out. “For you to use your magic to help them take the town.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “They’re asking my help against a wizard, and against a wizard’s curse. That’s different.”

  “You feel up to explaining the difference to them when you get there? Or to him?”

  She paused, turning her head sharply at the sound of a swift patter of footsteps on the gallery outside the door; then relaxed as a child’s treble voice whispered urgently, “Niddy, come back here!” There was the happy giggle of a toddler, and Starhawk smiled in spite of herself, as an older child evidently caught up with its wayward sibling and hustled it, unwillingly, up several flights of creaking backstairs to the attic once again. Earlier the Wolf had seen them scurry past the door of his room, two little towheads in the clumsy white linsey-woolsey smocks of peasant children, and had heard their mother scolding them to stay away from the common room and the guests.

  And well she should, he’d reflected. Dogbreath and Firecat looked as if they’d split a baby between them for supper and feed the scraps to the pigs.

  Her voice soft in the darkness, Starhawk went on, “The boys aren’t going to see it that way, Chief. They’re my friends, yeah—I’d say my brothers, if my brothers weren’t... Well, anyhow. But in the past year I’ve been friends with the people who live in the towns we used to sack. That’s something you can’t think about if you’re a merc—and maybe that’s why mercs only hang around with other mercs. When you torch a house, you can’t explain to the woman whose kids
are trapped upstairs while she’s being raped in the yard by six of your buddies that this is just your job. You do what you think best, Chief, and you know, when you finally make it to the bottommost pit of Hell, I’ll be there at your side, but I gave up war. I’m not going back.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said softly. Then, in a burst of honesty, “Well, not unless I was in trouble real bad,” and she chuckled softly, a faint vibration through the bones of his chest that stirred in him an odd, passionate tenderness. She lay on his blind left side; he had to turn his head to look down into her face. “And I need a teacher. You remember those hotshot kids who used to come to the school at Wrynde, the ones who seemed as if they’d been born with a sword in their hands. Those are the dangerous ones, the ones who leave a trail of dead and maimed until they learn what they’re doing—learn when to keep the sword sheathed.

  “I’m like that, Hawk. It isn’t just that I want it, need it—need someone to show me what this magic is. Most mageborn get some kind of teaching before the Trial brings on their full power. I have power and, by all my ancestors, I saw in Wenshar what power without discipline can do. But I owe Ari. I owe my men. I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for them. You too, since you couldn’t have saved me alone, and you’d probably have tried.”

  She said nothing. Pillowed against the scarred muscle and golden fur of his chest, her face remained impassive, gray eyes open in the darkness, thinking. In the eight years of brotherhood which had preceded their becoming lovers, he had gotten to know those silences, the thoughts that hid so stubbornly behind the steely armor she wore locked around her heart. In the last year, he’d occasionally wondered that she had ever emerged from behind that armor to tell him that she loved him.