The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “My personal physician bled her last night,” the Lady Prince said softly, close enough behind him that he could feel the black velvet of her bejeweled skirts against his back. “He wanted to do so again this morning, but I ordered him to wait until you could be reached.”

  “What about trephining?” he asked softly. “Boring the skull—it sometimes works...”

  “Good heavens!” The Lady Prince drew back, startled and appalled. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! Nor, I may add, has my physician, who’s the best in this city. I didn’t hear that Purcell had not told you until the third hour this morning. I sent a messenger to the engineering park at once but you’d gone...”

  Her words floated past him, meaningless as the distant clamor of the Wool Market that at this hour murmured even through the tightly closed and curtained windows. He sent one of her messengers back to the camp to fetch Butcher, the troop surgeon, then sank into the healing trance once more, seeking deeper and deeper for Starhawk’s spirit, trying desperately to piece together some means of holding it until somehow her flesh could be healed enough to contain it once again.

  Just that, he prayed—to the Mother, to the coldly clever Triple God, to the Valhalla tableful of his drunken, bearded, hairy ancestors... Just give me time.

  But he’d had time, his first ancestor would have said to him, with the ironic wisdom of those who have seen their own time feasted, fought, and fornicated away to nothing. He’d had a year.

  I never had training, pox rot you! I can’t do this! I don’t know how!

  But he stilled his mind again, as Yirth had showed him, and searched the darkness for Starhawk’s spirit, holding the cold flesh of her hand in his, softly calling her name. When Yirth had taught him these spells, she had said that the spirit most frequently responded to the name it had known as a child. He’d long ago forgotten Starhawk’s convent name, if he’d ever known it; she had never told him what her parents and brothers had called her in the shabby little village by the western cliffs. So he called her by the name he’d always known, as pupil, friend, brother-in-arms, and lover, and in time she answered, as she had said she would, from the Cold Hells and beyond.

  But when he came out of his healing trance, exhausted, cold, and cramped from kneeling beside her bed, he knew he had very little time left. Whatever was wrong with her, whatever damage the falling beam had done her, would claim her in the end. He felt as if he had piled in a little heap the detached petals of a white almond blossom in the mist of an empty plain, knowing that the wind would rise soon.

  Butcher was there when he came out of his trance, a plump, clever little woman with biceps like a wrestler’s and close-cropped, grayish-yellow hair framing one of the most beautiful faces the Wolf had ever seen. She read Starhawk’s pulse, gently felt around the ragged, crescent-shaped wound where the falling beam had struck her, and shook her head. “Trephining only works if you know where to drill,” she told him, folding big, tattooed arms over her massive breasts. “That’s the trick of it. Hell, you’ve helped me do it enough to know there’s nothing but lightness of touch needed in the drilling itself. But I don’t feel anything amiss near the wound. It could mean blood’s leaking into the brain somewhere else, or it could mean there’s something else wrong. The medical faculties of the University here are the worst in the world—with the Trinitarians running them that’s no surprise—but nobody knows much about head wounds, Chief, and that’s a fact.”

  There was regret in her bright-blue eyes. The Wolf remembered she had been one of Starhawk’s particular friends during their days with the troop, part of the small squad of fighting women drawn together in the largely masculine camp. But Butcher had seen many of her friends die, some of them hideously, and had somehow adjusted her philosophy to let her live with it.

  Sun Wolf wondered what had happened to his own philosophy that had let him carry on after the deaths of more friends than he cared to think about.

  But none like the Hawk.

  Outside, the gray sky was losing its color. By the waterclock on the terrace it was the tenth hour of the day. Quietly, deliberately, he steadied himself, putting aside his fear of what life would be like without that cool voice and wicked grin, putting aside his guilt over Opium’s scented kisses. “Can you stay with her?”

  Butcher hesitated. “How long? The assault hits the road an hour before dawn, so I need to leave for the camp by midnight.” And, seeing the hard glint of the Wolf’s yellow eye, she went on quietly, “I can save those lives, Chief. I can’t save hers. And we’re talking hundreds against one.”

  He sighed, and bent his head, leaning one heavy-muscled, shaggy arm on the soft tangle of sheets at Starhawk’s side. “I know,” he said, ashamed of that thoroughly selfish reaction. “You probably want to get some sleep tonight as well.”

  She shrugged as he got to his feet, shoving her hands into the pockets of the man’s breeches she wore. “Hell, I’ve gone into battle after staying up drinking all night, that doesn’t matter. Riding back at midnight won’t kill me, unless this curse decides that me falling off my horse and breaking my neck in a ditch is the thing needed to further bollix up the assault. If you have something to do, I’ll wait till then. But only till then—you understand?”

  “I understand,” the Wolf said softly. “And yeah—I have something to do.”

  He looked down at Starhawk, seeing with hideous clarity the sunken lavender flesh around her eyes, the pinched look of her nose and lips. The curse, he thought. Like the bread not rising or those damn poker hands, like the arrows that won’t hit their targets or the rats that eat the catapult ropes; one misfortune in a chain of misfortunes that will keep me here at her side through the night and in the morning when I might be helping them survive the assault—or that’ll get me killed by dawn.

  And he knew that djerkas or no djerkas, silver runes or no silver runes, he’d have to kill Moggin Aerbaldus tonight.

  Moggin Aerbaldus’ house stood in the patrician quarter of Vorsal, next to the hubristic granite palace of some merchant prince, which these days, due to its fortresslike construction, served as the city grain store. The film here was less than it was in the poor quarters at the base of Vorsal’s hill, where skeletal women sifted patiently through the night soil heaped in the streets for something edible that the rats might have missed, but the stench of decay was the same. The city had long ago run out of fuel to burn the corpses of the dead or space to bury them. They were dumping them over the wall in places, and the reek was a hellish miasma through which all things seemed to move as through palpable fog. On his way up the hill, the Wolf had seen all the commonplaces of siege: the dim-lit taverns where hysterical laughter vied with the drunken ranting of voices screaming about the rich who’d started this war, and dreamsugar addicts sat giggling quietly, for drugs were easier to come by than food and these days one could get drunk on very little; the rail-thin children selling themselves or their siblings to soldiers of the watch for the flesh of rats; and the rats themselves, sleek and fearless as they always were once all the cats and dogs had been eaten, too quick and strong to catch and watching passersby with businesslike intentness.

  The city had been under siege for six months. Even if the rains came before the walls were broken, the Wolf guessed most of these people would not survive winter.

  Though it was barely the third hour of the night, the line outside the grain store for tomorrow’s ration stretched out of sight down the cobbled street. Men and women and here and there an adolescent boy—the heads of households, Sun Wolf knew from the few sieges he’d had the misfortune to be caught in—bearing horn or metal cups in their hands. Wrapped in the spell of nonvisibility, he drifted like a ghost along the other side of the street. If they saw him at all, they’d be under the impression that he was a rat or someone they knew, but it wasn’t likely they did. Apart from the fact that none had brought a lamp—oil being for eating these days, not burning—he knew that starving men did not see so clearly in darkness. The
cold was sharp. He saw one of the men sitting against the grain-store wall turn to speak to another, drawing his several coats closer around his shoulders, his breath a drift of steam. The man spoken to did not reply, and when his neighbor touched him, fell forward stiffly. Those on either side merely pushed the body a little out of the way with their feet, unwilling to surrender their places in line even for an instant.

  Sun Wolf circled the block and found the alley that backed both the grain store and the house of the Aerbaldi. Even in these black streets he felt reasonably safe from the djerkas, knowing the hysterical paranoia bred by sieges. Within Moggin’s grounds it might be another matter. On the little rear gate where night soil and garbage were carried away, he sought in vain for the marks of protection and warning which his common sense told him must be there. He found nothing. But, he reflected wryly, as he had told Renaeka Strata, Ari, Purcell, and Starhawk—and it seemed every other interested party in the eastern half of the Middle Kingdoms—that didn’t mean they weren’t there. And again he cursed his ignorance.

  There was no way of telling, but it didn’t pay to take chances. He found a corner where the seven-foot sandstone wall of the garden ran into the granite side of the grain store, and flung the grapple that he’d brought to get him over the city wall up to one of the small windows of the grain store’s second floor. By scaling that wall he was able to edge himself sidelong over Moggin’s garden wall without touching it, a tricky and annoying process which made him curse the length of the siege. Of course every tree in Moggin’s garden had been felled, the fruit trees last, when the final crop had been plucked. The garden was a small one, and had been stripped bare, its shrubs pulled up, its vines torn down, lying baled on the brick terrace that stretched across the back of the pale sandstone bulk of the house itself, ready to be burned for fuel. In the midst of the bare ground with its crossing paths, the fountain was dry; the Kwest Mralwe troops had wrecked the city aqueducts. Though the hill springs over which Vorsal was built could support the populace even this late in the year, there was no water left over to spill, merely for the pleasure of its sound.

  Near where he had come over the wall, a bare circle of ground marked where a gazebo had been pulled down for firewood, and, as he approached the house, he saw that even the tool and potting sheds had been dismantled, their contents stacked with a kind of pathetic neatness along the edge of terrace. The muted orange light delineating the rounded arches of windows flickered over the blades of shovels and hoes, the tines of pitchforks and those great implements’ miniature brothers, and the Wolf felt an odd pang as he realized that Moggin, too, might like himself be a gardener.

  But the utter barrenness of the garden did, at least, insure that the djerkas couldn’t sneak up on him unawares. It left him no cover either, of course, and he glided swiftly along the wall, avoiding the line of sight from the lighted windows, checking his weapons as he moved—knife, sword, and the small, deadly throwing ax that could bring a man down thirty feet away.

  The house was small, as such town palaces went, old and elegant, the house of antique town nobility rather than merchants new-rich on cloth or spice. The windows were glass, barred with iron, the curtains within only half-closed. Tilting his head a little to angle his vision, the Wolf could see into the warm, firelit room.

  His first impression was one of comfortable shabbiness, of an old-fashioned frescoed ceiling, of walls lined with books and shelves and curio cabinets crammed to overflowing with tiny statues, painted eggs, ornate mechanical clocks, and astrological implements of silver and bronze. The fireplace was wide, its frescoes faded and rather soot-stained; before it, in a huge oak chair carved in the fashion of the last century, sat a man who must be Moggin Aerbaldus.

  He was tall—easily Sun Wolf’s six-foot height—stoop-shouldered, and had probably been thin even before the siege, with gray-green eyes and flecks of gray beginning in his straight black hair. With the long white hand of a scholar, he was folding up a large leather-bound book, a little awkwardly because it had been sharing his lap with a blond girl of six or seven. A girl of sixteen, also fair, sat on the tufted red-and-blue rug near the fire, beside a woman with a kindly face, who looked to have been plump in better days. They must have had their own stores to live on, the Wolf thought. They all looked far better than the people in the line outside. With the other rich families in the city, it must have been the same.

  The little girl’s voice came dimly to him through the thick glass. “But why didn’t Trastwind marry the Lady Jormelay, Daddy? She loved him—he didn’t even hardly know that old princess.”

  “Well, Jormelay was a witch,” Moggin pointed out sensibly. “Would you want to be married to someone who might turn you into a toad if you left hairs in the bathtub and didn’t refill the water pitchers when you’d drunk all the water?” And the little girl giggled, evidently a candidate for toadhood herself. “And remember, Dannah, the Princess loved Trastwind, too.”

  “Can you do that, Daddy?” inquired the girl, getting down from his lap. Her mother and sister, sitting near the hearth, were fair, but the child’s hair was white-gold, tied back with a ribbon of pink-striped silk and curling down over shoulders far too thin in the white linen nightgown she wore. “Fall in love just looking at somebody? Did you fall in love with Mummy just looking at her?”

  Moggin’s greenish eyes lifted briefly, to touch the brown ones of the woman by the hearth, and, standing on the terrace, Sun Wolf knew that all the Jormelays in the world wouldn’t have stood a chance against what lay between them. Moggin said softly, “Of course.”

  The mother drew her breath to speak, let it out, then said briskly, “And it’s bedtime for all good little princesses in this castle. Come on...”

  The older girl lingered as her mother and sister left the room, carrying a stick from the fire because there were neither candles nor oil for lamps. Moggin rose slowly, and went to put his book back in the jammed rosewood cabinet on the opposite wall. “And some philosophers claim that works of fiction are frivolous,” he sighed. The firelight threw his moving shadow across their gilded bindings, and made demon faces of the carvings on the great inlaid desk that stood between the bookshelves, littered with papers and quills and the tall, gleaming glass castle of a sander. “I sometimes believe that the ability to survive on the memory of joy—or to transmit it—is the quality that most clearly separates the human from the beast.”

  Her arms folded, the girl said quietly, “She wakes up crying at night, you know.”

  Moggin stopped in mid-gesture, book still in hand; then he sighed, put it in its slot, and turned. In his sea-colored eye was the helplessness of words that will do no good if said.

  “I’m sorry,” said the girl quickly. “It’s just that... It’s so hard to tell her not to be afraid when I’m so scared myself.” She stepped quickly across the dim width of the room to him, and threw her arms around his slender waist. His locked around her in return, the faded black wool of his robe sleeve like a bar of shade against the white of her nightgown, her hair the color of sunburned grass falling over both.

  For a moment her father rocked her gently, holding her close against him; his voice was a murmur audible to the Wolf only by the use of a wizard’s senses. “Don’t worry, Rianna,” he whispered. “They’ll go before the rains come. They have to...”

  She sounded scared. As well she might, the Wolf thought, grimly calculating how much she’d fetch in the brothels of the Street of the Yellow Lanterns. “If they break the wall...”

  “They won’t.”

  “Daddy...”

  “They won’t.” He took her thin shoulders between his hands, held her out from him, green eyes looking into brown, willing her to believe. “It’ll be all right. I promise you.” And he hugged her again, tight, desperate.

  Sun Wolf wondered, watching her depart through an arched doorway into the darkness of the rest of the house, whether those pretty girls, that serene-faced wife, knew what Moggin was, and what he had done. />
  Because it wasn’t just a case of protecting his wife and daughters from rape and murder at the hands of mercenaries sacking the town. Looking at that narrow, aescetic face in the dull throb of the dimming fire, the Wolf remembered the hotter blaze of the inn as it collapsed around Starhawk and the children she’d been trying to save, remembered the wavering filigree of lamplight touching Starhawk’s face as she lay dying in the house of the Lady Prince, and remembered, too, the hand full of darkness, casting the cold web of runes, and the wild triumphant laughter as his soul began to part company with his screaming flesh. A wizardling, to be my slave...

  His hand touched the miniature ax where it hung from his belt.

  Moggin turned his gaze from the door and crossed the room to a locked cabinet on the far side of his cluttered desk. Sun Wolf moved a little to follow him with his eyes and saw him undo the fastenings—not a simple lock, as any merchant or nobleman might keep upon his valuables, but three of them, holding the cabinet shut with silver chains. The doors with their elaborate carvings opened to reveal two shelves of books, as well as other things: a child’s skull, eight candles of black wax in silver holders, bunches of dried herbs and human hair, the feet and ears of various small animals, and an assortment of boxes and phials.

  For a long time he simply stood there, a tall, thin man in his shabby black scholar’s gown. Then, with a sort of sigh, he brought forth chalk, herbs, implements, and a black book which he propped open on the desk and turned to roll back the study carpets.

  Very quietly, the Wolf slipped away from the window to the door which gave from the terrace into the house. It was latched from within, and he knew better than to use magic this close to a wizard as powerful as he was now sure Moggin was, but Dogbreath had taught him other ways of forcing simple latches with a minimum of sound. He stood for a time in the half-open door, beyond which he could see the darkness of the hall and the ruddy glow from the door of the study, listening to the faint, reassuring scrape of chalk on red-tiled floor.