The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  In the distance, beyond the lightless towers, thunder-heads rose like a black wall. Eerily, he felt neither wind nor cold from that direction—only darkness waiting, and the cold rain emptying itself into the sea.

  I did hurt him, he told himself again, and conjured to mind the dim echo of the pain where the fire-sword of his power had seared his hand. Physically he’ll be off his guard. Yirth had said wizards couldn’t call the images of other wizards to crystal, fire, water. He knows there’s a wizard, but not a trained warrior. He’ll be expecting magic, not a knife.

  But he knew it had better be a clean kill. If Moggin escaped, and survived, that shadow hand would always be there, reaching out for him.

  What had once been the crop lands, the small farms and market gardens whose richness in the dry lands of the eastern Middle Kingdoms had made Vorsal a target of Kwest Mralwe’s greed, had long since been trampled and burned. Raw stumps showed where orchards had been felled for firewood and to make siege engines after the houses themselves had been plundered of their beams; rotting corpses dangled from the few trees that remained, seven and ten men all hanged together and now swollen and black. The battlefield stench of carrion lay over the place like ground-mist.

  His wizard’s sight caught the scurry of fat, insolent rats among the gutted farmhouses. A patrol passed him in the dark, steel back-and-breasts and turbaned helms proclaiming them Kwest Mralwe’s troops. He faded into the shadows of a half-ruined dovecote until they were gone, then moved on toward rising ground strewn with broken arrow shafts, fouled rags, and here and there a severed hand or finger that the rats hadn’t got. Though still some distance away, he could see the dim topaz specks of the watch fires along the town walls, now and then blotted by the movement of weary sentinels.

  Another skitter caught his ear, away to his right. More rats, he guessed. Another reason not to become a wizard—it made one think about things, like what battlefield rats fed on, something he’d been pretty much inured to in the days when he was one of the chief suppliers of rat food in the West.

  Before him stretched the open ground most towns kept around their walls, crisscrossed with trenches to slow down the big siege engines and lines of sharpened stakes to break massed charges. Here and there, like suppurating sores, rucked patches of light and shadow marked the places where clay jars had been buried, an old defender’s trick that would bear the weight of men but would collapse and strand a turtle or a ram. Ground water had collected in the bottom of the trenches, and Sun Wolf turned away from the thought that the torn land had the unsettling appearance of the dead body of the victim of torture.

  The open ground had probably once been much wider—wide enough to have permitted the digging of defense emplacements out of bowshot of potential enemy cover—but had been whittled down through the years by men who wanted villas more spacious than could be had within the city walls, but close enough to town to be convenient. A line of ruins ran right up to the main gates, flattened now by the battles that had swept over them all summer, but still offering cover to the attackers. Sun Wolf wondered how many city councilmen had been bribed by merchants and home owners to permit that.

  As he advanced along that line of ruined walls, the smell was worse, for his own archers and Krayth of Kilpithie’s had a habit of shooting at those who tried to collect the enemy dead—mostly to keep them from gathering up the slain horses for food—but the cover was good. He was glad of this, for his struggle with the shadow hand had left him depleted and weak, and he was putting off using a cloaking-spell for as long as possible. Once under the ramparts, he’d be able to scout a low place to toss a grapple. He was ragingly hungry, too.

  Fine, he thought, with dour humor. I’ll just buy fritters from a street vendor in the city when I get there. And then, Just my luck to be looking around for a snack in a city under siege...

  Again movement caught his eye, on his left, his blind side—he turned quickly to look.

  Nothing. Only a whisper of wind turning a strand of his hair against the ragged black linen of his shirt collar, and a half-heard flitter, like blown leaves.

  Must have been rats.

  Mustn’t it?

  In the black overcast another man would have been groping with his hands. To the Wolf’s odd, colorless night vision the ruins round him were clear, shadowless, black within black within black—walls and shattered beams, furniture and siege equipment, weapons and dishes, all pulped together into a barely recognizable mass, all stinking, all rotted, all swarming with vermin. This close, he could smell the smoke and carrion of the city, the overwhelming stench of night soil dumped from the walls. Even the pools and puddles of standing water did not gleam, but looked like flat patches of blackness on black ground. Without light to reflect, the eyes of the rats did not flash.

  So he saw no glint, no slip of light along metal... he didn’t know what it was that caught his eye. Perhaps a sound, metal scraping on stone, soft and vicious—perhaps the faint, sudden mustiness of oil.

  Then it moved again, and he saw the thing clearly.

  For one single, shocked second, he knew why some women screamed.

  The thing was as big as the biggest dog he’d ever seen, almost the size of a man. But its body was slung low, round and flat to the ground like a monster cockroach, the knees of its four angular legs rising high above the oily black metal of its back, its arms protruding in bars of jointed metal, slipping cable, and razor-tipped, articulated claws. It resembled nothing so much as a giant spider, headless, eyeless, like a vast metal puppet frozen for a suspended instant at the lip of a defensive trench.

  Then it moved.

  With a yell of terror Sun Wolf sprang back over the wall behind him, fumbling for his sword even as the logical portion of his mind asked what target he should strike for on that steel carapace. The thing flung itself at him over the trampled ground of no-man’s-land, moving with blinding speed, leg cables scissoring, razored claws snatching, all its metal joints whispering with an oily hiss. He ran back toward the higher ruins at the edge of the battlefield, and it scooted after him, oblivious alike to trenches and spikes, the articulated claws of its feet cutting little crescents in the rucked earth. Don’t be stupid, he thought, it can outrun you, it’ll never tire and you will... The low ruins around him offered no cover—the taller shapes of the burned-out houses seemed impossibly far away.

  The thing was only a dozen yards behind him when he plunged into the first of the standing ruins. He tripped over something soft that stank and rolled in the shadow pools of a shattered kitchen, flung himself toward the crazy ruins of what had been the stair to the skeleton of the upper floor. The thing sprang after him, long legs twisting nimbly over the nameless muck on the floor. The Wolf knew he had to be fast, deadly fast, for the thing was faster than he... if it caught him he was a dead man, and he had only seconds...

  The crazy stair lurched under his weight, scorched beams reeling drunkenly down from the darkness at him. The creature swarmed up after him like a roach up a wall, jointed metal knees pistoning faster than his own flesh and bone. Seconds...

  A razor claw ripped his back, cold metal, colder air, the steaming heat of his own blood. He grabbed a beam and threw himself over the side of the stair, swinging his weight full into the supporting struts, praying he hadn’t miscalculated and wouldn’t break his leg when he hit the floor. His body crashed into the fire-weakened joists that held the stairway up, a hundred and ninety pounds of whipping muscle and bone. The burned-out wood collapsed like a house of cards, bringing a torrent of seared timbers, rotted thatch, and startled rats down with it.

  The creature—spider, monster, killing machine—fell in the midst of the tangle, landing on its back, half-buried in debris. A metal arm snatched and claws whined as Sun Wolf ducked, grabbed the heaviest rafter he could find and heaved it on top of the waving legs. Broken timbers bucked with the thing’s struggling strength and he sprang back and ran, heart pounding, all weariness forgotten. He barely heard the shouts of th
e guards on the wall, the zing of the arrows they sent flying after him—the most viciously barbed warhead now no more terrifying than a flea-bite. He stumbled, fell, muck and water and worse things splattering him, and scrambled to his feet faster than he’d ever have thought possible, running on, running for his life as he’d never run before.

  He reached the camp sick, nauseated with exertion and terror, lungs splitting and pulse hammering. Ari, Dogbreath, and the Little Thurg—the only poker players still futilely pushing the same twelve coppers back and forth among a musky frowst of sleeping concubines and empty winecups—didn’t even ask what pursued him, but at his gasped command seized whatever pole arms were handy and grouped around him, waiting...

  And waiting.

  Still standing around him, they listened over their shoulders while he told what had attacked him in the ruins of the houses. After half an hour they relaxed enough to produce some food—the bread had not risen and the beans were crunchy—and after an hour, they returned, watchfully and with one guard always posted, to the poker game. Though he was exhausted, and, by this time, they were tired as well, Sun Wolf stayed awake, playing poker in Penpusher’s wet and filthy black clothes, until dawn.

  Nobody ever got more than two of a kind.

  And the creature, whatever it was, made no appearance at the camp.

  For a long while after she woke Starhawk lay in darkness, wondering where she was.

  Her woozy disorientation frightened her—the knowledge that if trouble came she was in no shape either to fight or run. Her head hurt her, as it had since... since something that for a moment eluded her... but the pain focused and intensified itself until she was almost nauseated, and her battered limbs felt weak. And there was something else, some sense of terrible danger, something that had wakened her in this darkness...

  Where?

  The convent? In her dreams she’d heard the small silver voice of the bells speaking the holy hours, calling the nuns to their reverences. For a moment she felt a flash of guilt that she lay still abed. Mother Vorannis would miss her at the chapel... though she felt sick, she had never missed the deep-night vigils...

  No, she thought. If this was the convent where she’d grown from girl to woman, she’d be able to hear the throb of the sea mauling at the cliffs below, see the moonlight where it lanced cold and patchy through the smoke hole of her stone beehive cell. The night would smell of the rock barrens and ocean, not be thick with the scent of a hundred thousand hearths and privies, nor weighted with this dreadful, louring closeness.

  Then the bells chimed again, near and sweet. She sensed somewhere the soundless pat of feet in stone passageways and the murmur of nuns chanting the Mother’s ancient names. Beyond the darkness she felt the Circle that turned, eternal and invisible, through the Being that was both Life and Death.

  It was a convent, then...

  Mother Vorannis’ face returned to her as her eyelids slipped shut again. In a gray frame of her shabby veils, the long nose, the V-shaped, agile lips, and the bright green eyes seemed overlaid with the spin of the years, at once young and middle-aged, like ivory slowly turning color. She realized she didn’t even know whether Mother Vorannis still lived.

  The pain hit her, making her head throb so that she wanted to wrench it off her spine and throw it away. Very clearly, she saw Mother Vorannis, standing in the corroded limestone arch between two cells, like a too-thin standing stone herself in the wan daylight, talking to a man...

  And Starhawk—though that had not been her name then—had been walking across the mossed stone and heather of the overgrown court, her colorless habit smudged all over with dirt and a pruning knife in her hand. The smell of the sky that day filled her, wet and cold with the coming of the storms, the salt pungence of the ocean, and the musky reek of damp earth. She’d been cutting the convent rose trees. Alien to the north, they were her particular care; she’d looked after them for ten bitter winters, wrapping them against the cold, begging dead fish from the kitchens to bury in the stony soil at their roots, caring for them as she’d once cared for her mother’s gardens. And it struck her, as she gazed back into the past at that tiny crystal scene, that she hadn’t so much as asked anyone to take care of her roses when she left.

  Or to take care of Mother Vorannis.

  Because the man Vorannis was talking to had turned and stepped into the watery glitter of the pale day, red-blond hair a flaring halo around the craggy, broken-nosed face. His beer-colored eyes had met hers, eyes she felt she had known—should have known, would know—all her life.

  She had said nothing. Never in her life had she known what to say. But when he’d ridden on the next day, scrounging food from the villages and farms of the cold northwest, she’d been with him. At the time she had never thought to ask someone else to tend the roses and not to let them die, had never asked how badly it had hurt Mother Vorannis to have the gawky, inarticulate Sister she had taught and cared for since girlhood turn her back upon her with no more words than a muttered “I have to go.”

  But as the nuns all said, one may run for years along the track of the Invisible Circle, and the Invisible Circle will always lead home.

  Then she heard it again, in the night’s deep silence, and remembered what had happened to her, why she was here, and what it was that had waked her with sweat standing cold on her face.

  It was the creak of a leather strap and the faint, ringing brush of steel armor against the arch that led onto the balcony outside her cell.

  The pound of her pulse for a moment threatened to sicken her, crushing like a nutcracker on her brain. Then it steadied—she made it steady—and she listened again. Earlier in the night, she could have sworn it was going to rain, but the wind slept once more. The night was still, overcast and dark as if a blanket had been thrown over her head, but she remembered the layout of the tiny room. The thick archway with its squat pilasters was to her left; the doorway into the corridor, to her right.

  Without a sound her hand slid under her pillow, and came up empty. It didn’t even occur to her to curse, for whatever was happening might limit her time to seconds, and she was already turning, with the soft murmur of sleep, to slip her hand under the mattress. The Chief, may the Mother bless his balding head, hadn’t forgotten where she habitually stowed her weapons. The Sisters had probably insisted on putting her sword and larger dagger away, but he’d managed to leave her with one of her hideouts, a six-inch blade with barely a ripple of a tang to the grip.

  That in hand, she muttered again and turned once more, humping the covers over her and sliding like an eel to the floor. The room was a box of night. Even the night rail she wore, the bleached homespun woven in all the Mother’s convents—including those in the greatest cloth-making city in the west—would be invisible. As she bellied soundlessly over the tiles, she wondered if she’d be able to stand. Her legs felt weaker than they had even this afternoon. Odds on there’d be men in the corridor... Did this mean the Chief was in trouble, too?

  Somehow she groped her way to her feet, breathless with the exertion, found the door in the dark and pressed her ear to it. An oiled lantern slide hissed. Yellow light struck her, blinding her in a momentary explosion of pain that seemed to blast to the back of her skull as she swung around, knife in hand. For a disorienting second she thought there were a dozen men in an endless colonnade of window arches. Then they solidified into three men, one arch, and one smaller figure whose white hand on the lantern slide flashed with gems.

  “Don’t go out that way, Warlady,” said a voice she recognized from years gone by as that of Renaeka Strata. “My men are in the corridor. I think you’d probably be safer in my house than you would be here.”

  Chapter 6

  “ ‘KIDNAP’ IS A hard word, Captain.” Against the queer, dead dun of the morning sky visible through the trefoiled points of the study windows, Renaeka Strata had the appearance of an exotic flower in her gown of pink and white. Entirely apart from the pearls which covered it, the gown
itself was an advertisement for her wealth. Kwest Mralwe’s silks, the Wolf knew, with their vivid delicacy of coloring, cost a fortune on the market, and there had to be thirty yards of the stuff hung around that skinny frame.

  He growled, “So’s ‘extort’ and ‘assassinate,’ words which rumor also attribute to the Lady Prince.”

  She raised her ostrich-plume fan modestly, like a woman who simpers “Oh, this old rag,” of a dress which cost some poor grut the price of a good farm and everything on it. “Well,” she purred deprecatingly, “we all do what we must.” The fan retreated, and the hazel eyes lost their coquettishness, becoming again the eyes of a king. “I spoke only the truth, Commander. She is safer here than she would be among the Sisters.”

  Sun Wolf opened his mouth to retort, then remembered his conversation with the King, and shut it again. His eye narrowed as he studied this thin, erect woman, in her pearl-crusted gown and preposterous maquillage, and he wondered how far she could be trusted. “May I see her?”

  “But of course.” She rang a bell, the note of it silver and small among the plaster arabesques of the study’s pendant ceiling, and a girl page appeared. “See if the Lady Starhawk is able to receive visitors,” she instructed coolly, and the girl bowed and hurried away in a dragonfly flash of green and gold. “She may even leave here with you, if you both insist. I don’t advise it and I won’t permit you to take her out of here against her will. My physicians tell me she isn’t well.” Those cool dappled eyes raked him, taking in the deepening of the lines that bracketed mustache and mouth, the bruise of sleeplessness that turned his one eye pale as yellow wine, and the scabbing-over abrasions on his high forehead he hadn’t even felt last night. “You look less than rampant yourself.”

  “A touch of the vapors.”

  Her thin mouth flexed with amusement, and she offered him her smelling salts in the bottle of cut rose crystal half the size of his fist. With a grin he waved them away, the wizard in him wondering what spices had gone to scent that aromatic vinegar while the mercenary priced the bottle at nearly two gold pieces—three, if your buyer was honest. He was interested to note now the Lady Prince’s smile etched a whole new network of lines in her face under the heavy plaster of cosmetics, the wrinkles of ready humor eradicating for that fleeting instant the deep gravings of sleeplessness, stress, and cruelty. It was the first time he’d seen her truly at ease.