The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “They’re gonna be killed, Chief. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it.”

  Ari, thought the Wolf. Penpusher, Dogbreath, Zane, Firecat... all his friends. This young man whose clear hazel eyes were so furious, so desperate, glaring into his. The dark hand reaching out of the storm’s darkness, the wild laughter of triumph shaking the skies... He remembered the eldritch horror of the patterns on that tiled study floor, the strength he’d felt on the night of the weather-witching as the spells closed around him.

  They’d be slaughtered.

  He drew a deep breath, everything in him hurting, as if he’d been caught in the twisting of a ship’s cable that can sever a man in half.

  “They’re volunteers. She isn’t.”

  “Horseshit!” His voice, normally very soft and husky, rose suddenly to a commander’s cutting lash. “She’s one person, Chief, and you’re talking about a thousand of us! A thousand, and we might lose five, six hundred, charging into a damned hoodoo like a bunch of kids trying to save Mommy from a gang of bandits! You got no right to leave us to that! You got no right to put your woman’s life over ours and the Hawk would be the first person to tell you so!”

  “She would if I’d still been the goddam captain, but I’m not!” roared the Wolf back at him. “You are!”

  “Then it’s a damn good thing you aren’t! You’re a puking coward! Yeah, you stay back here where it’s safe, where you won’t have to meet him... where you won’t have to see if these pox-rotted powers you’ve been telling us about will cut it in battle!”

  Blind with rage, Sun Wolf’s hand came back to strike; Ari caught it, his own face, hard as a steel mask, inches from the Wolf’s own.

  His voice was low again, low and hard as flint. “You haven’t got the right to leave us ditched, Chief. They’re waiting for you.”

  He lowered his arm. “No.”

  “She’ll keep. The battle won’t. Head wounds...”

  “Head wounds change fast,” the Wolf said softly. “Yeah, she could stay unconscious for days, or she could go. I don’t know how long it’ll take, or how long I’ll have to stay with her afterwards, until I know she’s safe. I’m not losing her, Ari.”

  “It’ll all be over by noon. Dammit, with a hoodoo there, defending the city...”

  “Noon if we break the wall fast. But if we get thrown back? If there’s street fighting? That can last for hours—God knows how long, with a wizard in it.”

  “And you’re afraid of him, aren’t you?” Ari spat the words at him, and he did not reply. “You know he’s better than you, is that it?” He jerked his arm away, breathing hard, his face bitter in the dull burnish of the torchlight. Sun Wolf thought about the siege engines, even now lumbering through the still, unnatural blackness toward Vorsal’s walls, remembered his private nightmare of having the bridge of the siege tower collapse beneath him, remembered the thousands of tilings that could go wrong in an assault, and knew that his men, the men he’d trained and led, the men to whom he’d been captain, friend, and god, were walking into all of them and more. Ari was right. Afraid or not—and he was afraid—a year ago when he’d still been captain, he’d never have chosen the life of any single person—certainly not the life of any of those sweet-scented girls who’d been his bedmates over the years—over going into even the most ordinary, the easiest, the surest battle with his men, let alone one against the dark specter of evil wizardry. Not even Starhawk’s.

  It was different now, more different than he’d realized. More different than he’d been prepared to face. He was no longer captain. And he wasn’t going to lose Starhawk—not to Opium, not to the curse, not to his own stupidity, and not to what others considered his duty.

  “Chief,” said Ari softly, “I’m begging. Don’t let us down.”

  He whispered, “I can’t.”

  The words “I’m sorry” were on his tongue, but he did not utter them. Goaded, confused, angry, and hurting more than he’d ever thought possible, he watched Ari turn on his heel and walk away.

  The din of battle came to him, with the slow watering of the leaden darkness beyond the window lattices. He was aware of both dawn and tumult distantly, like the sky above water beneath whose surface he hovered. But he could not break the healing trance to sniff the air to see whether rain was on its way and could not lessen his desperate concentration to think about his friends piling across the bridges from the siege towers to meet the wizard on the walls of Vorsal. The part of him that had been a soldier for thirty years identified the sound of battle, and the fact that Renaeka Strata’s servants had fallen silent to listen. Then his mind slipped down again, calling Starhawk’s name, slowly, thread by thread, spell by spell, weaving her spirit to her flesh until the flesh could sustain it alone.

  All the magic he could marshal, all the strength of his own flesh, he poured through the channel of old Drosis’ spells, healing, cleansing, infusing with warmth and life. Once the magic had shown him where to bore, the trephining had been easy. The spells he’d found in Drosis’ grimoires were brighter, surer, more flexible than Yirth’s, though it had taken Yirth’s training to make sense of them. Even in his inexperience, he could recognize the fine-tuned exactness of them, the greater knowledge of the body’s workings and the body’s needs. He could feel life, like a plasmic light, going from his palms into the cold flesh he touched, to kindle the faded light there.

  When he came out of the trance it was fully day.

  Servants had taken away the blood-filled basin, the scraps of bandages, lint, rags, the water, and the poultices and herbs. All around the bed their feet had scuffed the chalked circles of power and protection to cloudy mare’s-tails on the tessellated floor. The lamps that had burned all around him during the operation and his subsequent vigil had guttered out. The latticed doors of the terrace arch stood half-opened, against all medical advice, to let in the morning air, but the bronze silk curtains hung down straight.

  Outside, the air was absolutely still. There was no smell of rain, though the sky was gray and heavy, as it had been for weeks. The noise of battle seemed oddly clear.

  On the terrace wall a bronze sundial stood shadowless, mute. Below it, under its ornamental stone shelter, the waterclock’s gilded triton figure pointed to the second hour of the morning. Sun Wolf shivered. Moggin could have summoned rain. The fact that he hadn’t meant only one thing—that he wasn’t gambling that the storms would break the siege. He was, instead, doing exactly what the Wolf would have done in his place. He was setting up a trap. The fact that he was holding the rains at bay himself could only mean that the trap was a large one, and must involve fire.

  Sun Wolf shut his eyes, sick with self-hating despair. For a few minutes he considered getting a horse, riding out, hoping he’d reach Vorsal in time...

  In time to do what? He knew already that the greater efficiency of Drosis’ healing magic had drained his powers as well as his physical strength. Even at the best of times he hadn’t the skill to withstand the might of that shadow hand. While Moggin lived, the curse was still at its full strength, and he had no way to tell whether it would affect Starhawk now or not. It was two hours’ hard riding to Vorsal in any case—far too late to save them.

  Nauseated, exhausted, he got to his feet and nearly fell, catching at the arms of the blackwood chair beside the bed. He sank into it, lowering his throbbing head to his hands, his whole body hurting.

  Fine, he thought ironically. I’ve discovered a more efficient way to drain my strength. Just the thing I was always looking for...

  But Starhawk was alive.

  With the battle din came all the smells of the murky day and the city around him—privies, dye vats, fuller’s earth, spices, horses, the thick stench of waiting rain and the psychic miasma of petty politics, religious backbiting, and cutthroat squabbling for money.

  He reached out toward the south with the hyperacute senses of wizardry, and even that effort abraded him like haircloth galling an open wound. From the memories of a score of years
, he could almost see the swaying engines through thick clouds of yellow dust, the flash of weapons, fire arrows cutting pale streaks in the lightless forenoon. The stinks of blood, sweat, excrement, old leather, dirt, and smoke—the hot stench of boiling oil, molten lead, and heated sand poured down from the walls, the sizzle of charring flesh. He felt weak, ill, as if he saw all this from afar, unable to help them. And above it all the dark hand of the Vorsal mage would be reaching out... What else could I have done? he demanded desperately. There was no time! If I’d gone back to kill him, he or the Duke’s guards would have killed me! They’d still die, I’d die, she’d die...

  Or had he just been afraid?

  But his ancestors, if they had any answers, kept their silence.

  Boozy drunken bastards, he thought.

  Then far off, he heard the noise of the fighting change. A triumphant roar, drifting in the still air. Opening his eyes he staggered to the archway, pushed aside the curtains to lean on the cold marble pillar and look southward over the garden trees to where white smoke rose against the dun underbelly of the clouds.

  Fire, he thought, wrung with horror and grief and frustrated rage. Moggin’s trap. And another part of him cursed the man, knowing what the trap had to be, knowing there could be no escape.

  The acanthus leaves carved in the marble cut into the flesh of his forehead as he leaned it against the pillar’s capital, suffocated with helpless despair. What else could I have done?

  As if in answer, another sound came to him, shriller, higher, a distant keening.

  He knew instantly what it was.

  It was women and children screaming.

  The besieging forces had been victorious, not the defenders. The wizard had not, after all, been triumphant. The fires whose smoke he saw were inside Vorsal’s walls. The city was being sacked.

  “You couldn’t hardly blame them, Chief.” Dogbreath set down the two battered saddlebags near the foot of the curtained bed, and shook back his long braids. “It had been one festering bastard of a siege.” He shrugged, dismissing it with that, as if his boots and the baggy breeches he’d confiscated from the hapless shepherd some days ago weren’t stained to the thighs with blood.

  Because they were in a city that legitimately owed them money, Dogbreath still wore his armor. He’d cleaned it with a fast plunge into a horse trough and a wipe with straw, which was still snagged in the bits of chain mail and plate working their way at the edges through the blackened leather. Over it he’d draped a dagged surcoat of a terrifying shade of yellow—yellow that only could have come from the dye vats of Kwest Mralwe itself—and through its ripped sleeve and the parti-colored confusion of Dogbreath’s ragged shirt, a bandage could be seen on his arm. The ribbons in his hair were fresh. One of them, pink silk striped with white, Sun Wolf recognized, and it turned him sick.

  But he knew his men, and knew what it was like, to breach a city’s walls after a festering bastard of a siege that nobody had hoped to live through. He said, “I know,” the words bile in his mouth.

  “And we didn’t kill everybody,” Dogbreath temporized. “Most of the women and kids weren’t worth keeping—you’d spend more feeding them up to strength than you’d get for them as slaves. That went for the men, too. We didn’t have any orders one way or the other.”

  “I know,” the Wolf said again, remembering the skinny little girls outside the taverns, the old women digging garbage with arthritic fingers. He and Dogbreath had both mounted sieges where they had had orders to kill everyone, and had done so without a second thought. Remembering that didn’t help. Then he asked, steeling himself to hear the worst: “What about the wizard?”

  “Zero about the wizard.” Dogbreath shrugged, spreading his enormous hands. “No hide, no hair, not the tassel of his little pink tail. I figure he must have been on the walls waiting for us and got plugged by an arrow in the first volley. Hell,” he added, seeing the sudden narrowing of disbelief in Sun Wolf’s eye, “it happens, you know.”

  “Yeah,” the Wolf said. “But it doesn’t happen to wizards very goddam often.” God’s grandmother, he thought dizzily, the Duke didn’t lock Moggin up because of what I said, did he? It seemed inconceivable, even for what he knew of Trinitarians; inconceivable that Moggin hadn’t either escaped or talked his way out of it in time. For all his scholarly quiet, the man obviously kept his head in emergencies...

  “All I know is, the attack went slick as slime, like corn through a goose. So I figure whoever it was, he must have bought the farm on the first shot. It wasn’t that Moggin grut, anyway, that’s for sure.”

  “Why ‘for sure’?” He threw a quick glance into the shadows of the bed, where Starhawk still slept, her face white as the fresh linen the servants had brought. Taking his friend’s unwounded arm, he led him out the door and onto the terrace. The sun had set, but the garden below them was a fairyland of torches and lanterns, shadows dancing in the naked trees. From the windows of the dining hall at the far end of the terrace, thousands of lamps threw moving shadows on the gravel and the muted riot of hautboys and viols could be detected from that direction, vying with the jangle of hurdy-gurdies in the streets, drunken celebration, and a whore’s shrill laughter. There was free wine in every fountain in the city tonight.

  Dogbreath shrugged again. “That was pretty nasty,” he said. “I guess the King remembered the talk about it in the Council, and was still after getting a tame wizard all for his own. There hadn’t been much fighting up in that end of the city, but the pickings were rich. A bunch of us were going through old Moggin’s house when his Royal Etcetera showed up, with a gang of his own boys. Some of the guys had done the woman and the older girl before we showed up, but this Moggin pook and the little girl had barricaded themselves in the cellar. We figured, hell, they could stay there—neither would be any use as a slave and we were going to torch the house when we were done—but the King and his bravos hauled ’em out into the yard.”

  Dogbreath was quiet for a moment, his wide mouth flexing with distaste. “Hell, I don’t know why it was worse. We’d have croaked ’em both anyway. Maybe because it was done in cold blood. You’re sacking a town, you kill somebody who gets in your way, it’s like battle, you know? But the King gets this Moggin—he looked like a pretty harmless old pook to me, and God knows, if he’d had any magic, he’d have used it to keep the goons from snuffing his wife when they were done with her—down in the yard, and he says to him, ‘I want you to do magic for me.’ Oh, first he said, ‘Are you Moggin Aerbaldus,’ and that’s when we found out that was the grut you’d thought was the hookum.

  “So Moggin says, ‘There must be some mistake, I’m not a wizard.’ He was pretty steady about it, though he was shook up bad. He had the little girl hangin’ onto his coat like it was her last hope of dinner. So him and the King do this yes-you-are, no-I’m-not routine for a little bit, and finally the King says, ‘I’ll protect you from the Church if you’ll work for me, and we’ll rule the Middle Kingdoms together and so on and so forth.’ And Moggin says, ‘I swear I’m not a wizard.’ And the King says, ‘We’ll see about that.’

  “So he gets his men to haul the little girl over to the other side of the courtyard—it took two of ’em to get her away from Moggin. Then he takes one of the books from the study, and rips out a couple of pages for tinder and puts them in a heap on the pavement, and says, ‘If you don’t light that, they’ll slit her throat.’ Figuring I suppose that if he could get Moggin to admit he’s a wizard, it’s the first step. It was pretty raw. The little girl was sobbing, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and Moggin fought the guards holding him for a minute, then begs the King to let her go, goes on his knees, cries, pleads, the whole parade, says he can’t do it, swears he isn’t a wizard...”

  Dogbreath shrugged. “So they slit her throat. That’s when I left. And while all that was going on, damned if Zane hadn’t been going through the house while everyone else was out in the courtyard, watching to see if he’d really be able to make a fire to save the k
id’s life, and bagged all the loot worth having. So I guess we were wrong. But it was damn ugly all the same.”

  From the darkness of a near-by colonnade, a voice called out Dogbreath’s name. He glanced down the terrace in that direction, where a confusion of musicians and acrobats were preparing to go into the dining room among a mill of servants. Then he turned back and regarded the Wolf with beady black eyes. “Ari asked me to ask you, Chief... Can you work the weather for about six days more? Long enough for us to get through the badlands around the Khivas and the Gore? We’ll be moving fast now.”

  Baffled and sickened at the scene of the child’s murder, Sun Wolf pulled his mind back from the desperate puzzle of why Moggin would allow it, what it was that he feared. He’d been drawing the spell-wheels on the study floor, dammit... “Yeah,” he sighed, though the marrow of his bones ached already at the thought of turning aside the storms that he could feel, even now, drifting in from the Inner Sea. “He couldn’t ask me himself?”

  The squad-leader’s brown, simian face grew taut, and the dark eyes shifted. “He doesn’t want to see you, Chief.”

  Rage stirred in him, like a surge of heat, only to trickle away almost at once, leaving a bleached weariness behind. He glanced up at Dogbreath, to meet the deep concern in his eyes when there was no explosion, no tirade of curses, no bellowed threats. But Sun Wolf had made his choice. Starhawk was alive, and there was very little to say.

  “Pox rot it” was all he whispered.

  “Hey...” The quiet seemed to bother Dogbreath, who patted his arm with curious gentleness, as if realizing that his Chief was very far gone indeed. “He’s not gonna die of it,” he said cheerfully. “I’d probably feel different if the wizard—whoever it was—had been up on that wall throwin’ fire-breathing elephants at us, but as it is, I’m glad you stayed here and took care of the Hawk.” His eyes, bright and a bit inhuman, warmed somewhat. “She’s a damn good lady, Chief. I’m glad she’ll be around awhile longer.”