The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  It was a damn good thing that she had, he reflected. He’d never have had the nerve to say it to her.

  “It sounds bad, Hawk,” he said gently. “Whatever I decide when I get there, I can’t not go.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t.” She didn’t turn her face to him, only considered the darkness before her, impassive, as if Ari, Dogbreath, Firecat and the others were not also her friends and not also in danger of their lives. “But it’s going to come down to a choice for you sooner or later, Chief—him or them.”

  Her hand reached up, long, competent fingers tracing idly the scabbed-over crescents of demon bites on the heavy muscle of his hands. “You always told us in training that the man who knows what he wants in a fight has it all over the man who doesn’t quite; it’s the robber who’s able to kill a man in the five seconds it takes that man to make up his mind whether he’d kill somebody to protect his goods. I just think you’d better figure out what it’s going to be soon, because there’s a good chance that, when the time comes to make that decision, he’s going to be actively trying to kill you.”

  She was right, of course. She generally was, but that didn’t give him any clue as to what he should do, or make his own indecision any easier to deal with.

  Starhawk’s breath sank to a nearly soundless whisper of sleep, but Sun Wolf lay awake, his one eye open in the darkness. After a time he heard the brawling laughter of his troopers as they piled up the narrow wooden stair to the gallery—why shut up for the benefit of anyone spoilsport enough to be asleep at this hour? The arrogant clamor dimmed as they settled into the next-door room they shared. Then for a time, he listened to the hushed stirrings downstairs as the innkeeper’s wife and servants, who’d stayed awake to do so, cleaned the empty tankards and the spilled beer, swept the hearth where battles had been fought with the kindling from the wood-boxes and left strewn about the floors, and banked the kitchen fires. By the dim vibration and creak, he tracked them up the stairs, across the gallery, and up still further into the high dark reaches of the upper floors.

  Then he heard only the groan of the wind and the goblin pecking of branches against the shutters, felt the faint sway of the tall wooden building in the heavy gusts; the slow drift of the inn into slumber was like a great, black ship riding at anchor in the windy night. He would go to Vorsal, but what he would do when he got there he did not know.

  Lying in the darkness, he remembered Ari as he’d first seen him, a puppy-fat child with rainwater streaming down his long, dark hair, standing on the edge of the training floor of the winter camp in Wrynde, with his father’s pike and arrows balanced on his shoulder; Sun Wolf remembered a thousand winter afternoons and evenings on that floor, with the rain pounding the high roof above the vaulted lattice of the rafters while he put his men through their paces or ducked and dodged the Big Thurg or Starhawk in a practice bout. He’d yelled at them, ragged them, cursed them, and, when necessary, beaten them black and blue, conditioning them to the instant obedience of absolute trust—Dogbreath, Penpusher, the Hawk, the Big and Little Thurgs, Battlesow, the Goddess, that black warrior Ryter who’d been so skilled and so easy to drink with and who’d died with an arrow in his eye at some stupid battle in Gwarl...

  He had made them killers, had led them to their kills—had forged of them a brotherhood as only war can forge it. It had been hard enough to leave them and to choose the solitary search for another art, another need. Now to choose again, to kill the one person who could give him what he needed in order to save their lives...

  Dammit! he raged at the spirits of his ancestors, it isn’t fair!

  But the dry howl of the wind outside brought him only the suspicion of cosmic laughter.

  This might be my only chance!

  But he knew already he could not abandon his friends.

  He was still trying to make up his mind, to come to some conclusion, when the inn caught fire.

  “That scum-sucking smear of lizard dung!” The Wolf was coughing so badly he could barely get the words out; the pain of his cracked rib and his wounded shoulder gouged at him with every spasm of his smoke-clogged lungs. He could barely see, his eye and the empty left socket under its patch burning with the black billows of smoke that rolled up the narrow stairs from below. Starhawk’s arm was around him, dragging him; his wounds and exhaustion had left him weaker than he’d suspected. The heat was incredible.

  She yelled over the noise of shouts from below, “Who?”

  “That codless bastard of a Vorsal hoodoo, that’s...!” He broke off in another fit of coughing that ripped his lungs like a saw, and for a moment the hot light seemed to darken and the floor to sway. Then he felt the stab of his broken ribs as her arm tightened around him. Lit by a hellish storm of red glare and blackness, the stair plunged down before them like a coal chute to Hell. Memory flooded him and he grabbed at the newel-post. “The books! The Witches’ books!”

  “I have one set of saddlebags, I’ll go back for the other.”

  He could barely see through the burn of the smoke, but realized what the buckled leather straps were that he felt, draped around her shoulder.

  “Hang on. These stairs are a bastard.”

  He balked, groping for the saddlebag strap. The inn was wood and the wind bone-dry—he’d torched hundreds like it and knew exactly how fast they want up. Below them, all around them in furnace glare and darkness, the roar of the fire was a bass bellow ever which unidentifiable screams and shouts floated like whirling flakes of ash.

  “Go back for ’em now! Dammit, they’re the only books of magic we’ve got—the only ones we’ve even heard of!” He braced himself against her determined shove, which wasn’t easy, considering it was only her shoulder which held him up. “This place’ll be a pyre by the time we get downstairs...”

  “You stubborn old...”

  “DO IT!” he roared. She stiffened, bristling like an affronted cheetah. But for eight years, when he had yelled at her, with a wooden training sword, to go after men twice her size who were waiting to attack her with clubs, she’d gone, and the training held true. She dumped him unceremoniously at the top of the stairs, threw the saddlebags at him, and strode back down the hall, the veils of smoke closing round her like a suffocating curtain.

  Downstairs he heard the roar of something collapsing. Heat heaved up around him, blinding him, sickening him. Below he could see stringers of fire racing along the boards of the common-room floor, tendrils of it crawling up onto the carved rails of the stair. The hair rose on his scalp with primal terror and he had to fight the urge not to throw himself down the stairs, not to stagger, crawl, anything... anything not to be trapped abovestairs and burned.

  But we can’t lose the books, he told himself feverishly. It’s only a dozen feet... He clung to the saddlebags, his head swimming with suffocation and smoke, the superheated air scalding his lungs like burning sand, and squinted desperately into the smoke to catch a glimpse of Starhawk returning. More screaming, piercing and shrill, sliced through the roar of the flames with a sense of urgency that he could not place... He hoped to his first ancestor they’d gotten the horses out of the stable. According to Dogbreath, they hadn’t started out their search with much more money than he had, and it was nearly spent. If they were stranded without horses...

  Downstairs, outside in the yard, a woman was shrieking... Animal fear clawed him, but he wouldn’t leave Starhawk alone. They couldn’t lose the books, his only link with what he was... Where the hell was the Hawk...?

  He came to, gasping, coughing, his clothes and the air all around him rank with smoke, wet horse dung and hay pungent beneath him. By the noise and the hot wind that stroked his face, he knew he was outside. He rolled over onto something soft and threw up what little was in him. The smell of burning pine trees came to him, sappy and sweet.

  He fought the spasms of his lungs to a standstill; it seemed to take forever. A storming chaos of meaningless noise whirled around him, the fire’s greedy bellow, yelling voice
s, the thin splash of water by the inn-yard well and its cold stony smell, the frenzied whinnying of the horses in the hellstorm of the burning stable. Another piercing shriek, shrill with terror and despair—this time, remembering something Starhawk had said earlier, he identified it. It was coming from the attic where the innkeeper’s children slept.

  In horror, he rolled up to his elbow and opened his eye.

  Flames swirled thirty feet above the crumbling thatch of the inn roof; the sparks cascaded higher still, an upside-down waterfall pouring at the stars. Beyond it, the sky pulsed with a feverish light, and a bass roaring, like the sea in a narrow place, made him shudder. The trees on the mountainside behind the inn had caught. In a wild chiaroscuro of gold and ink, he made out the faces of the line stretching between wellhead and inn—Dogbreath and Firecat were among them, stripped to their shirts and passing buckets that slopped over and turned the ground around their feet to a processional carpet of glittering mud. He himself was stretched on the wet straw of the stable’s muck pile, a safe distance from the buildings, amid a strange assortment of bedding, clothes, bags, silver tankards, and furniture. By the feel of it, the straw had been doused down well.

  There was only one pair of saddlebags beside him.

  His empty belly turned to lead.

  “Starhawk...”

  He tried to rise, but the weakness of smoke and fatigue made his head swim, and he sank down again, retching. Someone came to stand over him. Looking up, he saw the Little Thurg silhouetted against the flare of the burning stables.

  “Starhawk...”

  The round face creased into a frown. “Was she with you, Chief? We found you at the top of the stairs...”

  “She went back for the books.” It was only a dozen feet! his mind protested frantically. She should have been in and out of there...!

  “Damn stupid thing to do!” He glanced over his shoulder—Sun Wolf now saw that the Little Thurg held the halter ropes of three horses, blindfolded with pieces of sacking. His barrel chest gleamed with sweat as if it had been oiled, where it wasn’t black with grime. “You were hanging onto those like they were your last hope of dinner,” he said, knotting the headstall ropes onto the leg of a huge oak wedding chest on the heap nearby—a monstrosity so garishly carved and painted the Wolf personally would have left it inside to burn. With a quick movement, the little man pulled the blindfolds from the beasts’ eyes, wadded them under one hard-muscled arm, then took a deep breath and turned to dash back to the stables once more.

  Hawk, no! thought Sun Wolf, stunned. No, please...! He shut his eye, as if that would blot from his mind the image of the Hawk walking away from him, black rolls of smoke closing her in...

  Then he heard the Little Thurg swear and a woman scream and opened his eye once more.

  The shutters of the inn’s highest gable were kicked out from within. Smoke rolled forth, its underside catching the glare of flames from below like reflected sunlight on a summer tree against the sullen blackness of the sky. Something dropped from the window, whirling and twisting as it fell—a pair of saddlebags. As they plunged, a book fell free, to splat face-down in the wet muck of the yard. Sun Wolf barely noticed.

  Like everyone else in the inn yard, his gaze was riveted to the window as Starhawk emerged, carefully straddling the sill.

  A boy of about four was clinging like a monkey to her back, naked but for a rag of shirt, his flesh showing burned beneath it. Starhawk gently reached into the black maw of smoke behind her and helped out a girl of eight or nine, naked but unburned, with a baby tied to her back in the torn remains of her nightshirt. The Hawk pointed at the timbering and beam ends, lit by the flames pouring out of every window of the four storeys which separated them from the ground.

  Above the horrified silence, Dogbreath’s harsh voice yelled, “Somebody get a blanket, dammit!”

  The little girl began to descend.

  Only the Hawk, thought Sun Wolf, could have given a child like that confidence to do something most adults he knew would have thought twice about. The smoke in the window behind Starhawk was lit from within by the bloody glare of fire—sparks swirled out and onto the wind. The ochre light showed her scarred face black with a mask of smoke and grime and oily with sweat, but calm, as he had seen it for years in battle. Against the filth her eyes seemed very pale. The thatch overhead was already in flames. It couldn’t be very many minutes before the rafters collapsed, taking all the floors in between and very likely the wall with them...

  She was giving the little girl all the time she could, in case she herself fell.

  When the girl had gone down far enough so that the odds were good a fall wouldn’t kill her, Starhawk swung herself cautiously out the window and started down. She moved slowly, overweighted by the child on her back—in many places the timbers and beam ends were smoking, the window sills flaming streaks against the soot-blackened plaster of the wall.

  There was a shrill scream and the girl beneath her slipped, skidding and falling, grabbing like a little animal at the beam ends of the first floor as they struck her. Nobody in all that chaos in the yard had managed to come up with a blanket and she hit the ground hard. A knot of people swallowed her up at once, one woman’s sobbing howls rising above the others. Starhawk, still up on the wall, stopped for a moment, her blackened face pressed to the plaster, the hot wind of the fire flattening her smutched white shirtsleeves and the pale flutter of her hair. Neither she nor the little boy clinging to her back made a sound. Then the baby’s crying sliced through the noise, wailing in terror and pain. The firelight splattered the mouthing faces, the line of buckets abandoned in the welter of puddles and mud.

  Dogbreath’s bass voice boomed, “She’s okay, just get her the hell out of the way...”

  The crowd broke, milling uncertainly. Someone carried the girl, someone else the baby, back away from the wall that was now in flames.

  Somehow the Wolf got to his feet. Wobbly-kneed and shedding straw and muck from his patched breeches, he staggered from the midden toward the billowing heat of the blazing inn wall. Dogbreath, Firecat, and a fat woman who must have been the children’s mother still stood close enough to the wall to be scorched, but would not run away. As Sun Wolf joined them, the little girl, still naked, ran back out of the crowd to stand with them, looking up. Starhawk edged down another few feet, the wall clearly burning hot to her touch.

  A voice yelled, “WATCH OUT!”

  And with a roar like the booming of blasting powder, the inn roof collapsed. The wall bulged, cracked, split-fire spewed from the cracks. Men and women fled in all directions, black against torrents of flame. In the slow-motion unreality of horror, Sun Wolf watched the whole building cave in, swallowing Starhawk and the child she carried in a firefall of burning beams.

  Chapter 3

  “I’LL KILL HIM,” whispered the Wolf. “I swear it by my ancestors.”

  He set down Starhawk’s limp hand, his own fingers shaking with fatigue, leaned against the carved proscenium that framed the cupboard-bed and closed his eye. Behind him, Dogbreath and Firecat exchanged a worried glance. In the doorway of the closetlike second-best bedroom, the woman of the house—the innkeeper’s fat wife’s sister—stood silent, her hands tucked beneath her apron for warmth, for in the long night and cold morning the fire in the room’s tiled hearth had burned low. In spite of it being nearly midday now the house was very still, save for the far-off sounds of a woman crying. The innkeeper’s wife’s sister bore the tracks of tears on her own thin cheeks. Though the single window was closed, a stench of ashes lingered on the air.

  Cautiously, Firecat said, “It looks like it was an accident, Chief.” She scratched her tangled red hair, her pointy face grave—she had been drinking buddies with Starhawk for years. “We all saw the potboy knock over the kindling basket early in the evening. When we helped him pick it up we probably missed some, that’s all.”

  The wood-paneled room had been long disused; it felt damp and cold and smelled faintly of
mildew. The light that came through the thick, yellowish panes of the shut window had a sickly cast, and through the bumpy glass could be seen the still-smoldering ruins of the inn and the blackened acres of pine woods on the mountain behind. Sun Wolf raised his head slowly, the dust-colored stubble of his beard glittering and his yellow eye gleaming malevolently. “Potboy, hell!” His voice was the grate of a rusty nail. Though Dogbreath and Firecat had washed, their clothes looked as if they’d been through some particularly nasty street fighting; the Wolf’s face was still smeared with soot, against which the thong of his eye patch had cut a pale streak, like a scar.

  From the bed beside him, a faint voice breathed, “Chief?”

  “Yeah?”

  Starhawk’s eyes remained shut, sunk in black hollows in a face chalky beneath its windburn and tan. Bits of her ivory-colored hair stuck out through the bandages around her head, strands so fine that they hung limply down like a child’s. Though she hadn’t been much burned, he had found neither breath nor pulse when they’d carried her here last night; in the darkness of the Invisible Circle, the deepest spirals of meditation where life begins and ends, it had taken him hours of seeking to bring her back. Too scoured to feel either victory or elation, he only reached out to gather her fingers into his again, to take comfort from the touch of her living flesh.

  Her lips barely moved. “Children?” she asked.

  “Baby and the girl are fine,” he said softly. “The little boy’s dead.”

  “Pox.”

  The child had been dead, his neck broken, when they’d dug him out of the rubble. It had saved Sun Wolf a decision—he had been, so far, only able to work healing magic on one person at a time. He didn’t know whether having proper training would have made a difference or not.

  Wearily, he looked around him. The small room faced north, dim and cold even in daylight, and the fire in its beehive hearth of blue and yellow tiles did little to warm it. The sister of the innkeeper’s wife—departing now to look after her kin—had married the town miller, and the house was commodious, given the size of the village; this room had a puncheon floor, from which the carpet of rushes had been swept to permit the Wolf to trace the Circles of Power around the bed. Their chalked curves were smudged now, from people walking back and forth across them, but they’d served their purpose. At least the Wolf hoped they had.