The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “Purcell,” the King said, leaning toward the elderly head of the House of Cronesme, “you were the agent for your brother’s interests in Vorsal before his death. Do you recall anyone in that city who was accused of being—er—unusual in any way?”

  “It is difficult to say, Majesty,” replied the old man with punctilious politeness somewhat rare in the Council members’ dealings with their king. Balkus and the head of the Greambii were already conversing in low voices, like men during the uninteresting scenes of a play, negotiating about next year’s fleeces or space on one another’s trading ships. “The simple folk always look upon scholars with mistrust and accuse them of evil powers merely because they are literate. Likewise, as Lord Balkus has pointed out, ill-favored or eccentric old women tend to be pointed at as witches, whether their powers extend beyond mere herbalism or not, just as women who...” He stopped himself short so suddenly Sun Wolf wondered for an instant if he’d been stabbed, and his nervous glance cut to the head of the table, where the Lady Prince sat with her white hands still folded but her face like a catapult’s trigger rope and poison in her pale eyes. “Er—that is—what I meant to say...”

  “And were there such people in Vorsal?” inquired Sun Wolf, after it became clear that the old man’s panicked silence was not going to be broken without help.

  Councilor Purcell, who had seemed momentarily hypnotized with terror, fumbled to retrieve his train of thought; a little man of sixty or so, lean and birdlike in the boned black wool doublet and fur-lined over-robe characteristic of the respectable folk of those lands. The white ruffle around his neck was starched linen, not the three-strat-per-foot lace that prickled stiffly under Lord Balkus’ bottommost chin; the Lady Renaeka, Sun Wolf thought, was getting ready to swat this little man like a fly. He made a mental note to inquire what that was all about, later.

  “Er—As I said, there is always talk...”

  “About whom?”

  Purcell seemed to be trying to make himself the same color as the pink-and-white inlay of the wall behind him. His voice, always soft, faded to a colorless little murmur, as if apologizing for speaking on the unpleasant subject at all. “There was an old scholar named Drosis, who died several years ago; not a wealthy man, you understand, but respectably off. I would put his income at five hundred a year. The street mongers used to threaten their children with his name, and not a child in the town would walk past his house. He was friends with one Moggin Aerbaldus, a philosopher, to whom he left his library when he died. Aerbaldus has never had a word said against him since, though. He is the author of the treatise ‘On the Nature of Responsibility’ and ‘On the Divisions of the Universe’—perfectly respectable and orthodox, as our good bishop will attest. He has an income of approximately...”

  “And is there a witch?” Sun Wolf cut off this pecuniary information—Purcell looked rather surprised that he wouldn’t be interested in a catalogue of the man’s investments.

  Again Purcell rolled a frightened eye toward the quietly glittering Renaeka. “A—a woman named Skinshab,” he said, almost stammering in his haste. “Ugly—very ugly—and vulgar—I’m not even sure she still lives. Goodness knows how she made her living; several mornings I saw her through my office window picking through the garbage bins and had to summon my servants to chase her away.”

  “Why?” Sun Wolf demanded curiously. “Were you planning to sell the garbage?”

  “Er...” Purcell blinked at him, then laughed hesitantly. “You will have your little joke, Captain.”

  “Yeah,” the Wolf muttered and turned his attention back to the Lady Prince. “Let’s understand one another from the start, my Lady. It’s to your advantage to give me what help I ask for, to pay me at least the cost of my own keep and that of my friend who’s ill. She’s staying at the Convent of the Mother—”

  “Since the Sisters take in supplicants,” interposed the Bishop, disapproval of the Old Faith heavy in his voice, “it hardly behooves us to contribute to their cult. Do they know you’re a witch?”

  The Wolf’s breathless, scratchy voice hardened—he didn’t spare the Bishop so much as a glance. “I think a donation of some kind would be in order. Eight silver pieces a day isn’t too much to...”

  “My lord Captain,” the Lady Prince said suavely. She seemed to have recovered her poise—heavy lids thick with gilding drooped lazily over those brilliant eyes. “We agreed to meet with you today to give you information regarding the possibility of a magician in Vorsal. It is Captain Ari who is hiring you to find and destroy this man—if he indeed exists. It is to him you should apply for money.”

  “After paying his men enough to keep them fighting your damn war, you know he’s got little enough of that. I’ll need money when I go into the city to buy information or get myself out of trouble.”

  She spread her lovely hands helplessly. Among mercs, the Lady Renaeka was notorious for her parsimony, a hardfistedness which didn’t seem to extend to her dresses—the pounced green silk that made her stand out from the soberly dressed Councilors like a peacock among ravens must have cost seventy gold pieces, several times what one of the dyers in her employ would have made in his life. “I absolutely agree with you, Captain. But that is between yourself and Captain Ari. Personally, I have no proof that a wizard even exists in Vorsal. The misfortunes that have plagued the army camped before its gates are nothing much out of the way, after all. If the Captain attributes them to an evil magician, and believes you to be a magician and able to win him victory...”

  “We’re a week and a half past the time the rains started last year, and they were late, then,” Sun Wolf cut her off. Several of the Councilors looked scandalized at this lèse majesté, but, he reflected, if they refused to pay him they couldn’t very well fire him for impudence. “You want Ari to pull up stakes and head north while he can still make it over the Khivas River gorges?”

  “To feed his men on what all winter?”

  “Is the knowledge they’re starving going to cheer you up when Vorsal starts making alliances with your trade rivals, come spring?”

  She regarded him for a moment as if determining which herbs to use for seasoning when she braised his liver. “Two silver pieces.”

  “Six.”

  “Three.”

  “Six. Three won’t leave me enough in hand to buy a dead rat in a city that’s been under siege all summer.”

  Another member of the Council opened his mouth to contribute his mite to the negotiations, and without so much as looking at him the Lady Prince said, “Shut up. Four and a half.”

  “Five days in advance.” She opened her mouth to retort, and he cut in with, “And don’t say it.”

  After a single, venomous instant, her expression changed to the coquette’s smile that had kept her enemies running in circles for the eighteen years of her rulership of the Council. “My dear Captain—it’s going to take you five days?”

  The Councilors tried not to look as if they’d been ready to take refuge under the council table.

  He smiled back. “I’ll pro-rate your refund—but I’ll keep the interest.”

  “No one in town would give you better interest than the Stratii, Captain.” She rose to her feet in a rustling storm of petticoats, signifying that the audience was at an end. “My clerk will prepare the contract.”

  “Good,” said the Wolf. “I’ll compare your copy with mine when they’re done.

  “Not a quarter-bit up front,” he grumbled to Dogbreath, who had been lingering inconspicuously in the arches of the Guild Hall’s filigreed porch. “May his ancestors help the poor bastard who owes her money.”

  Admittedly, a single bodyguard would have been little use in case of real trouble, but going into a city that was hiring him without any backing whatsoever set Sun Wolf’s teeth on edge. So Dogbreath had stuffed his braids up under a countryman’s wide straw hat, donned fustian shirt and slops—all property of a shepherd they’d met in the hills who’d had the misfortune of being roughly his s
ize—and had loafed, chewing a straw and examining with fascination the lingerie on sale from vendors’ stalls in the porch, which overlooked the vast chaos of the Wool Market, waiting to see if the Wolf was going to come out.

  Stretching in front of the Guild Hall, the Wool Market of Kwest Mralwe was a stone-paved forum larger than many small towns and seething with activity like a beehive in swarming time. Crossing it, Sun Wolf and his bucolic-looking bodyguard jostled shoulders with clerks and staplers, master weavers, merchants, and bankers, among the high-piled ranks of goods—woolpacks and fleeces, aromatic bales of dyewoods, huge baskets of madder and indigo, and netted parcels of shellfish and of the tiny insects from the forests of the south, whose crushed bodies yielded the richest of scarlet dyes. Dealers were there, too, displaying jars and cakes of mordants—potash, tartar, and the precious alum without which the gaudiest dyes would be useless. The air was sharp with the sweetish smell of the alum, the musty odors of wool, with the stinks of smoke and vinegar from the dyeing yards of all the Great Houses that had their headquarters in the neighborhood; the mellow pink sandstone walls flung back a surging chatter of up-country dialects and the sharp-voiced monosyllables of the merchants, quoting prices, credit, and risk. Money-changers and bankers had set up their tables along the walls to finance deals for percentages and futures, little heaps of silver gleaming coldly on their checkered surfaces, and near the gate a fat woman in a widow’s elaborate coif was doing a land-office business in meat pasties from a steaming cart.

  As they passed beneath the main gate to the even more crowded streets outside, Dogbreath glanced up at the red-and-blue banners of the House of Stratus, with their gory heraldic device of the Pierced Heart, which rippled overhead, and wondered aloud, “Why’d they choose that as their symbol?”

  Remembering the Lady Prince, Sun Wolf replied dourly, “I think they’re trying to prove you can, too, get blood out of a stone.”

  “So are you going in?”

  “Not tonight.” Sun Wolf put one big hand over the Hawk’s. She squeezed his fingers lightly, but there was something in the quality of her touch, some lassitude in the way she sat beside him in the stone embrasure of the cloister arch, that he didn’t like, and he asked her again, “You sure you’re all right?”

  She turned her face away, embarrassed and angry at herself for showing weakness. She’d been sleeping when he had come by the Convent that morning. For the Hawk, who was usually up prowling before dawn, this was unusual, and to Sun Wolf’s eye she didn’t look as if she’d got much good from her sleep. The day before yesterday—the last day of their journey—she’d been able to back a horse.

  “I’ve felt better,” she admitted, looking back at him with only the usual cool irony in her gray gaze. “Not recently, I’ll admit. If we had to fight our way out of here, I could probably manage.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, judiciously deadpan. “Some of those nuns look damn tough.” And he was rewarded by her grin.

  The Convent of St. Dwade perched on the edge of a mountain gorge a mile to the northwest of Kwest Mralwe, which, like all the Middle Kingdoms, was Trinitarian. St. Dwade was one of the few centers of the Mother’s worship left in the eastern Middle Kingdoms. By the heavy, old-fashioned architecture of its vine-tangled stone mazes, Sun Wolf guessed it had existed long before the Forty Years’ War that had ended the Empire in chaos. He wondered if it still had a Prophetess, through whom the Mother spoke in visions, or whether the Trinitarians had made Delegation one of the conditions for the Convent’s survival.

  In either case the place made him vaguely uneasy, as all strong points of the Old Faith did. Half-deserted, gently crumbling under its shroud of ivy, blending into the rocks of the mountainside, rather than simply clinging, it whispered with secrets beneath the hushed mantle of soul-deep peace.

  “I’ll have to go in sooner or later,” he said, in reply to her earlier question. “I’d rather wait a day and have a look through the books.”

  On the journey north he’d fully intended to study the books of the Witches of Wenshar for which he’d risked his own and Starhawk’s lives, to search in them for lore concerning the magic of ill. But conscious of the danger in which Ari and his men stood, he had pressed on as quickly as he dared over the mossy dolomite uplands west of the mountains. The first three nights he had sat up with Starhawk, who had been little better than comatose after all day in the swaying litter. Prey to the aftereffects of his own ordeals in Wenshar and the desert, it hadn’t been easy to stay awake even for that, let alone to engage in the unfamiliar discipline of study.

  Starhawk had worried him. One night she had wept in delirium, calling again and again for someone whose name he did not recognize, begging not to be left alone; after that she had struggled in bitter silence with the secrets of her dreams. When she seemed a little better, they had traveled more swiftly, far into the autumn nights. Though he’d meant to read, his body’s own need for recovery had caught up with him, and, at each day’s end, he’d slept like a dead man.

  It had helped him. His shoulder only hurt now when he made an incautious move. He had thought Starhawk looked a little better a few days ago, but now, considering the hollows beneath her scarred cheekbones and the dark circles around her pale eyes, he wondered how much of that had been an act, put on to keep him from delaying and further jeopardizing their friends. Something in her closed quiet now reminded him of her fighting days, the way she’d get when she was badly injured, and would retreat alone to her small rooms in the maze of lofts above the square stone bulk of the camp Armory. He wanted to knock her head against the knobby fieldstone of the archway behind them and tell her to get back to bed.

  After a little silence, broken only by the taffeta rustle of ivy leaves and the murmur of distant prayer, she said, “Every day you wait you’re giving to him, you know.” She turned back to look at him, and he saw clearly then the pain printed in the corners of her eyes. “He’s going to know sooner or later there’s another wizard working for Kwest Mralwe. If he does have a confederate in the camp he may know it already. Then I don’t think there’ll be much in those books that’ll help you.”

  “Maybe,” he grumbled, unwilling to believe that she was probably right. “But knowledge of any kind is a weapon. I’m not walking into there naked. This Moggin—and of the two Purcell knew about he seems the likelier candidate—has had books to study, he’s had training, and I have a feeling he’s had the Great Trial as well.” She cocked her head at him curiously; he made a vague gesture, not knowing why he had that impression, only knowing that something—the feeling in the armory tent? the half-submerged memory of some dream which had waked him with the smoke of the inn fire stinging his nostrils?—made him almost sure of it. “My first ancestor may know what makes me think that—and what I’ll be up against,” he said. “I don’t.”

  Two nuns passed, climbing the worn stair up the side of the tiny courtyard, little bigger than a bedroom and rising to the vertical chaos of walls and vegetation hanging above, a tall figure and a short, soundless in their dark-gray robes of ancient cut, their shaven heads bowed. They barely glanced in the direction of the big warrior in his dark-red leather doublet and the woman dressed like him, like a man and a warrior, in travel-stained breeches and doublet and scarred old boots, wisps of fair hair sticking out through the white slash of head bandages. Their silence—like the Hawk’s, Sun Wolf realized—was a silence of deep-kept secrets to which no one was party. Had she learned that in her years serving the Mother’s altars? he wondered. Or had it been that silence that had drawn her to the decaying convent within sound of the Outer Ocean, where first their paths had crossed?

  Starhawk laid her other hand, cold and slightly unsteady, over his. “Only your ancestors know how much of the magic in those books is safe to use. The women who wrote them couldn’t have entered the demon cult unless they were corrupt in their souls, Chief. Maybe there are kinds of power it’s better not to use. You be careful.”

  “I wi
ll be,” he agreed, rising as the gray-robed Sister materialized from the overgrown grotto of the cloister at the bottom of the court to sign him that it was time for him to go. “If I can figure out what ‘careful’ is.”

  As he picked his way down the uneven path to be guided out—for, like most of the Mother’s dwelling places, St. Dwade was a maze within a maze, a tangle of organic spirals growing, like the chambers of a sea-shell or the infinite tiny labyrinths of insect lairs, through the long deeps of the years—Starhawk watched him go from where she sat, observing the width and movement of his shoulders in the velvety pigskin, the burnish of light and shadow on the muscles of his knee, and the cold flick of daylight on the brass hardware of his boots, as if memorizing the shape of him against lonely darkness to come. As soon as he had vanished through the dark archway at the bottom of the court she put her hand to her head and lay down on the bench, the close-grained stone still warm from his thighs. The sour sky overhead had darkened perceptibly by the time the garden around her stopped rolling and heaving enough for her to stand and stagger somehow back to her room.

  Sun Wolf’s father, a great black-haired beast of a man whose glory had been to boast in the long-houses of the women he had raped, had from time to time repeated a piece of advice which his son still recognized as valid, though he was no longer in a position to live up to it as once he had. Never mess with magic, the big warrior had said; never fall in love—and never argue with drunks or religious fanatics. The latter activity would simply waste time which could be better spent doing practically anything else, but the former two could get a man killed before he had time to turn around.

  He had, of course, been right.

  The ten books of the Witches of Wenshar which had been written in the common tongue of Gwenth ranged from herbals and anatomies to grimoires and notebooks, covering topics from the treatment of loose bowels and sore throats to the summoning of the Eater of Heads. No notes, the Wolf reflected, on how either to control or dismiss the Eater of Heads, whatever it was—and he had no desire to find out—once it arrived. He thought he’d skip that one. Some spells and processes were meticulously outlined; others contained only sketchy references to “make strong the Cyrcle”—presumably a Circle of Protection, but no hint of which of the several Circles Yirth had shown him was appropriate for this case, if indeed the necessary circle hadn’t also been beyond his onetime master’s limited ken. Some had the key words of power deliberately omitted. A number of the spells in one of the grimoires had been starred in red ink by some later hand, which could have been a personal reference as to source, a reminder that they worked better in the dark of the moon, or a warning never to touch. One, to summon the eldritch magic from the bones of the earth, had been extensively glossed with marginal notes in the shirdar tongue.