The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  Within, it was like an improbable house of cards—charred beams, broken boards, and burned struts, all leaning against one another in a crazy rattrap a sharp wind could bring down. Above him, a portion of the spiral stair to the top still dangled perilously, like clots of filth on a spider strand; skeletal black rafters made a broken lattice against dun sky. It smelled of ashes and burned flesh, as the inn had done. Only here, more than just one little boy had died.

  A woman was moving around the ruined inner wall, a branch of something in her hand.

  She was cloaked, a hood drawn over her face. Motionless in the fey web of illusion, the Wolf smelted the perfume of her body, mingled scents of autumn flowers and womanhood, mixed with the dim pungence of what he recognized as hellebore. Now and then her cloak would move aside with the sweep of her arm as she passed the branch along the charred beams, and in its shadow jewels sparked on velvet. For a few moments he watched her in silence, big arms folded across his chest, breathing slow and soundless. Then he moved.

  She gasped as his hands seized her arms above the elbows, dropping the plant she carried as she tried to turn and strike him, but didn’t go for a weapon. Her hood fell back, freeing a raven torrent of curls. “No! Let me go! Please!” His hands tightened hard, and she stood still in his grasp.

  To say her eyes were brown would have been like describing those deep, volcanic lakes of the Gorn Massif as blue—accurate only up to a point. In the crisscrossed darkness of the siege tower they seemed almost black, enormous in the delicate modeling of the most exquisite face Sun Wolf had ever seen. The ends of her hair tickled his wrists where he held on to her; it would spring back, he thought distractedly, were he to crush it in his hands.

  “What are you doing here?” His voice, never melodious and worse since the Great Trial, sounded hoarser than ever in his ears.

  She gazed up at him for a moment with scared eyes, wary as a wildcat in the gloom. Around her throat, shining against the dusky skin, lay the thin steel of a gold-plated slip-chain, a slave collar too delicate to discommode a master’s caressing hand seriously. She wore another necklace with it, a baroque pearl on a chain. Where the cloak had slipped down, he saw half-bared creamy shoulders above a bodice of blood-colored silk and the froth of chemise lace. Gently he released her and bent to pick up the herbs she’d dropped. “White hellebore,” he said softly. “They brew poison from its roots.”

  Her hand, which had reached out for the branch, drew quickly back. “I didn’t know that.” Her accent was the soft drawl of the Gwarl Peninsula, on whose western coasts they’d been fighting last year. “They said in the camp the tower was witched. My granny used to tell me hellebore would show a witch’s mark.”

  “Only to another witch.” Her brows—butterfly lines of fragile black—puckered slightly, breaking the smooth quizzical beauty of her face with something infinitely more human and tender.

  “Oh, damn,” she breathed, vexed, and bit her red lower lip with small white teeth as if in thought. Then her frown deepened, and she looked quickly up at him in the gloom. “Oh, double damn! Are you the wizard?”

  He grinned at the startled disbelief in her voice. “Yeah, but I left my beard and pointy hat back in the tent.”

  It startled her into a giggle, swiftly suppressed; the dimples still quivered in the corners of her lips as she dropped her gaze in confusion. He fought the impulse to reach out and touch her. By the chain, she was another man’s slave. He wondered whose.

  “I’m sorry.” She looked up at him again, her eyes filled with rueful self-amusement. “They did say you used to command the troop. Of course you couldn’t do that if you were...” She bit her lip again, a tiny gesture that didn’t disturb the dark stain of rose petals there.

  “Were old enough to look like wizards are supposed to look?”

  She ducked her head again. “Something like that.”

  “And you are...?”

  “Opium.” The delicate brows flexed down again; something changed in her kohl-darkened eyes. As if she felt his gaze, she drew her cloak back up over her shoulders and, with a gesture almost instinctive, tucked up a stray tendril of her tumbled hair and straightened the pearl on its chain. “My man was killed by that fire.” There was a note that was not quite defensive, not quite defiant, in her voice. “He was one of the ones trapped on the wall when the tower burned, slaughtered when the others couldn’t get to them in time. They said—the ones who got out of the tower alive—that the fire started under the hides. Those hides had been soaked so the fire arrows from the walls wouldn’t catch them. I know they’ve had guards on the camp and on the park, but I thought... what if it’s somebody in the camp already? A spy or someone working for them? There’s been more and more talk about witchery. I just wanted to see... I don’t know what.”

  She glanced at the hellebore still in his hand, then warily up at his face, as if trying to read what was now no more than a blurred pattern of light and darkness in the gloom. He turned the branch over, fingering the pale greenish flowers. There seemed no reason to doubt her story; after all, no one could possibly use this tower again.

  “You’d better be careful who sees you with things like this,” he said softly. “Yeah, there’s more and more talk about witchery; if it goes on, things could get damn ugly here in camp. You won’t be the only one to think it might be an inside job.” He didn’t add that the thought had occurred to him the moment he’d seen her enter the tower.

  The sky had gone the color of iron beyond the charred rafters overhead, and crazy slips and patches of yellow torchlight flared erratically through cracks in the wooden wall. “You’d better get on back to your tent.” If her man had been killed yesterday, he found himself thinking, she’d be sleeping alone.

  She drew her hood up over those crisp curls and settled its folds around her shoulders. For a moment he thought she would say something else to him—fishing, as he found himself mentally fishing, for more words. Even in silence and uncertainty, she radiated an immense vitality, a quality of bright wildness beyond her beauty that defied description but that drew him, as the warmth of fire draws travelers in the cold. Hands tucked thoughtfully behind the buckle of his sword belt, the Wolf turned from her to step out into the wavering lake of the engineering park’s torch glare once more.

  For a moment he stood watching the slaves putting away their tools. Three or four men and a woman too homely to be prostituted moved briskly about under the barked orders of the engineer. From thinking about the girl, his mind went to what she had said.

  A year’s search had yielded him only one wizard, but along the way he’d now and then encountered granny magic, primitive and untrained tinkerings with the fringes of power by those who had little understanding of what they did—those who did not even know of the Great Trial which broke the barriers protecting the soul from what it was. As Opium had pointed out, the Vorsal mage might not be in Vorsal at all. There were those in camp who well might wish ill upon their masters, whether they served in one man’s bed, or every man’s, or mucked out the latrines. Among them, there could be one who knew a curse that would stick.

  But in his gut, he didn’t believe it. Whatever was in the camp—whatever he had sensed in the armory tent—was greater and deadlier than that.

  Ari and Zane came striding over to him, young animals in the gold-and-black light. In contrast to Ari’s metal-studded leather doublet and faded shirt, Zane had taken advantage of their presence in the Middle Kingdoms to deck himself in the brilliant colors for which their cloth was famous, a slashed blue doublet, breeches striped with scarlet that sported a codpiece decorated with a tongue-lolling demon face. “Chief!” grinned Zane with delight. “I knew you’d come!”

  “You can look around here tomorrow if you want,” Ari said softly. “But this is all fakement. We’re putting together a major assault—the last one, we hope—in three days’ time, and the engines for that are being built in the big engineering park at Kwest Mralwe itself.”

  Th
e Wolf raised one tawny brow. “Whose idea was that?”

  “Mine. They’re being guarded day and night, too—it’s those you really need to look at, not these.”

  “Yeah,” argued Zane. “But if we’re dealing with a hookum, won’t he just be able to see them in a crystal ball or something?”

  “He might.” The Wolf glanced around him, feeling again the tension in the air and hearing it in the guards’ voices and in the sharp staccato of an argument somewhere among the dark jumble of tents beyond the park’s circle of light. “But there are other ways for curses to be spread. How about the other troops? Krayth’s and the City forces? This kind of garf happening to them, too?”

  “I think so,” Ari said. “Krayth was over here two days ago—he tells me his men have started deserting. He’s had to put a guard on the horses and the money box, not that there’s much in that. If this assault doesn’t do the job, we may come to that here. Krayth’s got a longer road home than we do, too, clear the hell to Kilpithie. I’m not sure he’ll make it.”

  “If I don’t find and take care of that mage before your assault,” the Wolf said quietly, “I’m not sure you will.”

  Across the warm-lit circle of the open park, Sun Wolf got a glimpse of Opium’s cloaked form, heading for the voices and soft-glowing tents of the main camp. Zane turned his head as the velvet dark of her cape stirred the dry weeds with a passing gleam of white petticoat lace. Like a heat, the Wolf felt more than saw the greed and calculation in his eyes.

  Her man was dead, the Wolf thought, who had bought her and used her and had held the legal claim to her. There would probably be a lot of men looking at her like that now. He wondered how she’d make her living, once her man’s front money ran out, assuming there was any left of it by this time. It was something he had never thought about, when he’d bought women for himself.

  Full dark had fallen, the night eerily still for this late in autumn and turning cold. The flare of campfires and torches ruddied the sky above the camp; on the dark and shapeless land, ten thousand watchfires sprinkled the darkness, a slave collar of fire around Vorsal’s throat. But Vorsal itself was dark, save for the tiny lights of the guards on its walls, its turrets and balconies and ornamented roof-trees a dead black filigree on the windless sky.

  “Come on over to Bron’s tavern,” Zane offered, turning his eyes quickly, once Opium had blended with the darkness. “All his beer blew up a couple weeks ago, but that old White Death still of his works fine. It’ll be just like old times.”

  Old times—more nights than he could count in that shabby ambulatory pothouse with which Bron followed the troop every summer, night breeze and torchlight filtering in from the maze of marquees and open walls, the talk going around of horses, of women, of the art and the technique of war, conclusionless and absorbing until late in the lamplit nights. He wondered if Opium would be there, and the thought made him shake his head, remembering other things. “Tomorrow, maybe,” he said. “It was a rough road up here. The Hawk had a bad time of it, worse than she said, I think. Something tells me I ought to ride back to town, and make sure she’s all right.”

  Zane looked startled, puzzled, and a little hurt, but Ari nodded and said, “Tomorrow, then. You watch your blind side, Chief.”

  She’d be asleep when he got there, he knew. Even so, he rode back to Kwest Mralwe under an evil sky, listening to the dim singing at the camp fade into darkness behind him.

  Chapter 4

  “A WIZARD IN VORSAL?” Renaeka Strata, Lady Prince of the largest banking house in Kwest Mralwe, folded her well-groomed hands on the pearl inlay of the council table and considered the matter with narrowed hazel eyes.

  “That’s what it looks like, my Lady.”

  The great Guild Hall in Kwest Mralwe was designed to accommodate the Grand Council, a comprehensively representative body whose laboriously elected ward and craft stewards balanced their votes against those of the ancient houses of the local nobility. But whenever matters of actual policy had to be decided, it was the King-Council which met in the small chamber upstairs. Having worked for the King-Council before, the Wolf knew them and the Small Council Chamber well: the heads of the greatest merchant houses plus the Trinitarian Bishop—a cadet member of the House of Stratus himself—assembled in a pastel jewel box of a room, whose wide windows, with their twisted pilasters of pink marble, overlooked the teeming pool of the Mralwe docks. It was a chill day; the crystal-paned windows were shut. Even so, the din of the harbor was faintly audible in the hush—the clamor of stevedores, the braying of pack asses, and the thin mew of circling gulls. This late in the season, the deep-water traders that plied the Inner Sea were long since moored for the winter, but the more foolhardy of the coasting vessels were still in operation, trying to sneak through one last run of timber or wheat before the storms closed the sea lanes for good.

  The Lady Prince held her silence a few moments more, and none of the other members of the King-Council, grouped about her like the wings of a particularly inefficient battle array, had the temerity to interrupt. Certainly the King didn’t, seated immediately to her left, his stiff, archaic robe of Mandrigyn silk all but hiding the shabby doublet beneath. When he poked his hand out surreptitiously to pick his nose, Sun Wolf could see that his ruffleless cuff was frayed.

  “Since the death of Altiokis of Grimscarp, there has been a good deal of talk about wizardry,” the Lady said after a time. “He was said to be a wizard—certainly he had some secret to his longevity, if in fact he was the same man to whom my grandfather and great-grandfather lent money.”

  “He was the same man, my Lady.” Sun Wolf tucked his hands behind the buckle of his sword belt. “And he was a wizard. A powerful one, too, before he started drinking himself silly—court wizard of the Thane of Grimscarp, before he put the Thane away and took the power himself. Before he died, he had a century and a half to murder his competition.”

  The cold light of the windows before which he stood pricked at the tarnished bullion trimming his doublet of dark-red pigskin. With his scuffed eyepatch, thinning shoulder-length hair, and ragged mustache, he had the appearance of a rather mangy and bitten old rogue lion. But if any of the King-Council thought he had come down in the world from the days when he had stood there, armored and with a dozen of his men loitering in the anteroom, they forbore to say so. Even alone, there was something formidable about him.

  “As his ‘competition,’ as you term it,” the Bishop said grimly, “consisted of wizards, witches, and other such tools of Hell, one can only comment on the wondrous ways in which God uses Evil against itself.”

  “Oh, I’m not denying you helped him,” rumbled the Wolf, more to see indignant fire flash in the prelate’s lackluster eyes than for any other reason.

  The Bishop, a young man whose few strands of limp ecclesiastical beard were totally inadequate to cover what chin he possessed, started to protest, but the Lady Prince silenced him with a lifted finger, the great emerald of her ring flashing like a warning beacon in the steely light.

  “Yet Altiokis has been dead little less than a year—surely too short a time for anyone to master the powers with which Captain Ari seems to think he deals.”

  “It only means this wizard studied magic in secret. I’ve come across those who have—a woman in Mandrigyn, whose teacher was snuffed by Altiokis, and another woman in Wenshar, who had access to ancient books.” The Bishop looked affronted, but clearly wasn’t about to incur the Lady’s annoyance by commenting on the spread of Evil down the years.

  Sun Wolf went on, “Wizardry is an inborn skill, a calling like art or music. But like perfection in art or music, it needs years of teaching, of discipline, and of technique.” What else it needed, it was best not to say. The Lady Prince was a tall, sword-thin woman in her fifties who gave an impression of great beauty without actually possessing any; he could see her thoughts being sorted and shuffled like cards. “The wizards I’ve met have been incomplete half wizards, trying to piece together what t
hey need out of lore that’s been cut to pieces over the years. Maybe this one in Vorsal is the same. Maybe not.

  “But wizardry’s not something that can be hidden. The people of Vorsal might not have known this person was a mage, but there’s a good chance they’ll have known something. And it’s likely that this wizard learned from a master before him. Is there any rumor, any tradition, any gossip, about someone in Vorsal? Maybe someone who’s dead already...” Turning his head slightly, his one eye caught the expressions of the King-Council—the Bishop almost sputtering with righteous indignation, but the merchants’ attention already beginning to wander, like men settling themselves to hear too-familiar quibbles over something that has neither the immediacy nor the importance of real life.

  “Personally,” sighed the head of the House of Balkus, a fat man with eyes like locked money boxes, “I have better things to do than listen to the gossip of the marketplace. The simple folk are always accusing some hag or other of witchcraft. It gives them occupation, I suppose, and target practice. Presumably they do so in other towns than this.” He folded his hands before him like a round white suet pudding, stuck all over with diamonds. “But I have always wondered why, if those poor deluded old witches truly had power, they live in hovels, dress in rags, and allow brats to throw dung at them in the first place.”

  “Maybe because their idea of what’s important goes beyond their next meal,” Sun Wolf retorted, with a pointed glance at the bulging mountain of flesh beneath the well-tailored black doublet and robe.

  The flabby jowls reddened, but before Lord Balkus—who controlled most of the wool trade from the inland nobles—could decide what to reply to this, the Bishop inquired silkily, “And have you yourself become a wizard these days, Captain Sun Wolf?”