The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  Slowly, he said, “That fire was no damn accident.”

  Firecat came over to him and laid a worried hand on his arm. “Chief...”

  He pulled irritably away from the blunt little hand with its bitten nails, regarded the woman with an eye bloodshot and gritty with leftover smoke and lack of sleep. “I know it,” he said softly. “I was the one who was supposed to die in that inn.”

  How he knew this he wasn’t precisely sure. But he had the impression of having seen something, felt something, just before he had smelled the smoke—and when he looked at it now, it made a kind of sense. His death in the inn fire, like his capture by the shirdar, would have been just one more of those stupid, random accidents contributing to the destruction of his troop by someone who didn’t care who else got caught in the nimbus of ruin.

  Listening to the distant sobbing of that fat woman who’d mended his shirt, the fat woman whose little boy now lay dead in the nursery upstairs, he was surprised at how angry this made him.

  “Well,” Dogbreath’s bass voice broke into his reverie, “you better keep that theory to yourself if you don’t want us run out of town on a rail.”

  Though obviously nervous at the prospect of dealing with this savage-looking crew of brigands, the miller-prodded, Sun Wolf had no doubt, by his wife and sister-in-law—offered to let Starhawk remain in his house until she recovered. But, though her breathing was easy by the following morning and she seemed to be recovering, he had seen enough head wounds in his days as a warrior to be leery of leaving her alone. And Starhawk, though shaky, had agreed that they dared not delay.

  So he refused, to the miller’s patent relief, and Dogbreath, surprisingly, produced a large sum of assorted coinage to purchase the miller’s litter and two mules, plus provisions for the journey north. Sun Wolf recalled clearly the squad-leader mentioning at some point in the previous night how little money they had. Watching the Wenshar eagles, Peninsular stallins, and one or two of the silver pieces weight-minted with the mark of the House of Stratus—one of the most reliable coinages of the dozens circulating in the Middle Kingdoms—change hands, he guessed that Dogbreath had had the presence of mind to loot the inn cashbox in the confusion of the fire before joining the bucket brigade in the yard.

  The Little Thurg met them in the scrubby pine woods east of the village with a string of eight horses, a guarantee of good speed on the road north. “Those ours?” the Wolf asked, seeing among them the dappled gelding he’d gotten from the King of Wenshar, but not Starhawk’s skinny bay.

  The Little Thurg shrugged. “They are now.”

  They took the switchback road along the mountain face, the pines that covered the high country on this side of the Dragon’s Backbone rising stiffly around them against a blowing gray overcast. Looking back, Sun Wolf could see the charred blot where the inn had stood beside the Wenshar road above the village, the small dull shapes of men and women moving about it like ants around a carcass, and the lingering columns of smoke lifting to the morning sky.

  Vorsal stood two miles inland, where the long, fertile coastline of the Inner Sea drew near to the projecting towers of the Gorn Mountains that split the Middle Kingdoms in two. Twelve miles north, Kwest Mralwe dominated the end of the mountains and the roads to the west and north through the golden Hills of Harm. But Vorsal, the Wolf thought, looking out at it across the brown landscape of autumn, had a fine natural harbor—or had had, until its wharves had been wrecked by the navies of Kwest Mralwe and all the Duke’s ships burned to the water-line—plus some excellent croplands, as well as the usual upland sheep pastures. Its walls, of the hard gray local granite, were tall and thick, rising in jostling rings on a small promontory, a final outspur of the distant Gorns; the roofs that could be glimpsed over them were tiled in red and yellow, clustered with turrets and crisscrossed with the fussy little balconies and catwalks typical of this part of the world. There had probably, the Wolf thought, once been a number of trees making rustling glades of the small town gardens of the rich.

  Those, of course, were gone. They’d been under siege all summer.

  Ari’s troops were camped north and west of the town on rising land. The camp was ringed with a trashy gaggle of raw stumps of the oaks common to these golden hills. Coming from the north around the swell of a whaleback ridge, Sun Wolf could see that the armies had stripped and felled every tree for miles to feed their cook fires. On the town’s southern side, another mercenary troop was camped—he made out the black-and-yellow banners of Krayth of Kilpithie, a man he’d always gotten on well with—while the main body of the Kwest Mralwe levies occupied what was left of the harbor and stretched in a wide crescent around the east of the town. Smoke hung over all three camps and wreathed the turreted walls of the city like the brooding presence of evil. The day was still, but the close feeling of breeding weather and the sullen, bruised look of the sky over the eastern sea hackled Sun Wolf’s nape as he and Dogbreath rode through the silence of the burned-out farms. Thick and stenchy, the smell of the camps reached him—privies, wood-smoke, rotting flesh—and the black shapes of ravens circled like blown leaves against a charcoal sky.

  In the camp itself, it was worse.

  “It’s uncanny, Chief.” Ari led the way through the maze of tents and shelters with the unthinking ease of long familiarity, stepping over pegs and ducking guy ropes, fending aside makeshift clotheslines and avoiding clotted puddles of garbage, the gold rings he wore on his ears, on his bare arms, and in his long black hair flashing coldly in the wasted light. “It’s weird. It isn’t just the bows breaking anymore, or the ballistas collapsing—one of the siege towers caught fire in the assault yesterday, caught fire on the inside as far as we can tell. Gods know how it happened.” He still used, the Wolf noted, the old triple/singular case for the Deity, a vestige of childhood as unconscious as putting hand to scabbard in a crowded place. “Twenty men bought it inside, and forty snuffed it on the walls—the damn siege ladders broke when we tried to go up to back them. God’s grandmother, we’d used those ladders a hundred times! It isn’t just that.”

  No, thought the Wolf, listening to the eerie quiet of the camp. It’s more than that.

  He knew the sound of camps as a sailor knows the rush and murmur of the sea, a beloved element that any moment might rise to kill. Behind the sullen hush, dim undercurrents reached him: men shouting at each other, the passionate rage in their voices speaking of causes deeper than any immediate quarrel; closer to, a man’s voice cursing; the sound of blows; and a woman’s sobs. The camp smelled of misfortune. Had he been a stranger, the Wolf would have gotten his horse from the lines and ridden out, rather than spend a night in the place.

  “The food’s been bad all summer,” Ari went on, as they reached more open ground in the middle of the camp. “It’s making Hog crazy—his bread won’t rise, the salt meat rots, the beer sickens in the barrels. One flour cask we broke open was literally squirming with red-worms. There’s jimsonweed everywhere in the hills—we’ve cut it three times near the horse lines but we always seem to miss a patch or two, and we’ve had to put down almost thirty horses. I swear, even the camp followers have been coming down with more cases of this-and-that than I’ve ever seen! It’s nothing you can ever put your finger on. It’s just—things.”

  In the shadowless, late-afternoon gloom, the Wolf could see lines in Ari’s face that hadn’t been there when they’d parted in the spring. The young man had lost flesh—a few inches shorter than Sun Wolf’s six feet, he’d always, behind his panther hardness and grace, carried the suggestion of the chubby orphan the Wolf had first taken in. His mustache, thick as the bear’s pelt which draped his shoulders and back, had gray in it, though the young captain was only twenty-five, and there were faint smudges of fatigue under his warm gray-brown eyes.

  “Take me around,” said the Wolf. “Show me what you can.”

  After a week and a half on the road, he was somewhat recovered from the vicissitudes of his brief stay in Wenshar, though the ri
bs cracked by the King of Wenshar’s guards still pinched him, if he made an unguarded move, and he occasionally dreamed about ants. After traveling by litter for most of the journey north along the stony rim of the Gorn Massif, Starhawk had been well enough yesterday to mount a horse, though, by the time they reached Kwest Mralwe, she’d looked exhausted and sick. He had left her in the Convent of the Mother in that city, though he hadn’t felt easy about it—he had never quite trusted the Old Religion. Now he was glad he hadn’t brought her here. There was ill in the air of the camp. On a warrior with a head wound, it would stick.

  “We’ve moved the armory four times.” Ari held aside the clumsy hide door flap, letting the Wolf duck through ahead of him into the vast, smelly darkness of the tent where the arrows, the spare weapons, and the ropes were stored. As the bar of sickly daylight fell through onto crates and coils, red eyes gleamed furiously from the shadows—then, with an angry scurry, they were gone. The place stank of rat droppings, mildew, and spoiling hides. “Feel the ground.” Letting the curtain fall, Ari lifted high the cheap clay lamp he’d lit from the guard’s fire. “It’s as damp as a spring. It was bone-dry four days ago.”

  Sun Wolf knelt—Ari was right. “And rats in the daytime,” he murmured. Dogbreath had told the truth—he hadn’t seen a cat yet.

  Ari said nothing. But his eyes, as he glanced over his shoulder at shadows which, now that the door flap was down, seemed oppressively close around the dirty blob of lamplight, said far more than he would ever admit aloud. “Watch out,” he warned, as the Wolf reached for the nearest arrow chest. “We got brown dancer spiders hiding in some of the boxes. Three or four people have died.”

  “Place hasn’t been hit by lightning lately, has it?” The Wolf drew his sword and used its tip gently to lever off the lid of the chest. Something the size and color of an apple seed flicked away on long, threadlike legs. “Or the sea risen to flood you out?”

  “Believe me,” Ari said gloomily, “I’m waiting for it.”

  Sun Wolf knocked with the pommel on the box a couple of times for good measure, then sheathed the blade and ran his fingers lightly over the warped slats, half shutting his eyes. Nothing showed on the damp-splotched wood but smudges of dirt and the half-obscured stencil of the maker’s name,?LGICUS, K.M., but he felt a queer sensation, not heat, not cold, not yet dampness, but definitely something, a concentration of the miasma that seemed to hang everywhere in the camp. Unconsciously he wiped his hands on the elk skin of his breeches as he turned away.

  “As far as I know, a curse like this can’t be thrown from a distance,” he said as they ducked back under the tent flap and Ari blew out the lamp and returned it to the depressed-looking guard. “It needs a mark of some kind to work through, an Eye.” Though there was no mark, no stain, upon them, he wiped his hands again. “Just because I didn’t see anything in there doesn’t mean it wasn’t written. Sometimes a wizard can only see an Eye if he uses salt, or powdered hellebore, or mercury... there’s probably other things as well, for other kinds of hexes. And the Eye could be anywhere in the camp.”

  “Mother pus-bucket...” Ari muttered, tucking his hands behind the buckle of his sword belt as he walked, an unconscious imitation of Sun Wolf that Starhawk affected as well. “We’ve had the place guarded...”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Oh, come on!” Ari protested. “I haven’t let the troop go to hell that much since you’ve been gone.”

  In front of a nearby tent, a camp follower—a slave, by her hopeless face and the steel choke-chain that circled her throat—was kindling a supper fire for whatever soldier was her master. Though the wood was dry, Sun Wolf, without breaking stride, reached out with his mind and called smoke from it as if it were damp and, with a skiff of wind from the motionless air, twitched the stinging gust into Ari’s eyes. The young captain coughed and flinched, fanning at the smoke...

  ...and when he opened his eyes a split second later Sun Wolf was gone.

  “Skill has nothing to do with it.”

  Ari was going for his sword, even as he turned, but stepping swiftly, soundlessly behind him in that moment of blindness, the Wolf had taken it. In a training class he would have struck him with the flat of it, and both men would have laughed and cursed at the joke. Now, after a long moment of silence, he only turned it hilt-first to hand it back.

  But for nearly a minute Ari did not touch it. In his eyes, in his silence, Sun Wolf read uncertainty and fear, and more painful than either, shock—the sense of loss, of seeing his friend turn before him into a man he wasn’t sure he knew.

  Fathers, Sun Wolf knew, sometimes see sons like this, though his own never had. To Ari he had been a father for years, and to be a father, he knew, was to be unchanging...

  It was a long time before Ari spoke.

  “It’s true, isn’t it.” There was no question in his voice.

  “I told you that last spring.”

  “You told me...” Ari hesitated, then reached out and took the sword from his hand. Breeze made silvery flecks in the black bearskin of his cape, snagged a lock of his heavy black hair among the old scalps hanging at his shoulder, then seemed to think better of it and fell still again.

  “You told me you needed to go seek a teacher, if one could be found. But you’d been elbow-deep in witchery all winter, Chief. It was still on you, then. And I thought...” He sighed, and looked away. “I thought you might have seen it as a way out. A way to retire, to give me the troop, to ride away before you ended up buying some little six-foot daisy farm someplace.” The steady, gray-brown gaze returned to Sun Wolf’s face. “And I was glad, you know? Glad if you wanted out you could leave instead of die. Because, face it, Chief, you could put all the fifty-year-old mercs in the world into one bathtub and still have room for the soap. I didn’t give two cow-pies together whether you found what you were looking for, really. I just—didn’t want to have to bury you. But you did find it, didn’t you?”

  Sun Wolf remembered Kaletha of Wenshar, the end result of his first year of seeking—her vanity, her pettiness, her ghastly death. Then he turned to the crowded spires of Vorsal barely visible above the tangle of canvas, dirty banners, and woodsmoke. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I found it.”

  “That’s good.”

  He looked back at Ari, tufted brow rising over his single eye, and the young captain met the look squarely, not understanding, perhaps, but willing to accept. Just as well, thought Sun Wolf, that the Vorsal mage had made it obvious by burning the inn just where the lines were drawn.

  But his mouth and eyebrows still quirked with irony 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 smart-mouth, 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.