“Thanks.” He leaned against the archway behind him, his head bowed and his long, thinning hair hanging down around his scarred face, feeling drained and bitter and very alone. Part of him hated Dogbreath, with his bloody boots and the dead child’s pink ribbon tied in his straight black braid—hated him the way he hated himself for what he had been. He knew that Dogbreath could be no different from what he was—what he, Sun Wolf, had made him. They had seen combat together, had put their lives on the iron altar for the gods of war to take if they wanted, and he knew that what was done in war was done as in a different life, tainted with terror and the battle rush that was the only way to survive.
Starhawk was right, he thought wearily. He should have let nothing drag him back to the way life was lived in war. He had gone for his friends, his troop, and for the captain who was like a son to him. And they’d turned their backs on him, when he’d chosen... what? A single woman’s life over theirs? Or life over death?
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Tell him I’ll work the weather for him. I’ll give him a week, if I can.”
“Thanks. You watch your blind side, Chief.” Dogbreath clasped his hand briefly, then strode jauntily away down the evening-dark corridor, the pink bow on the end of his braid a jogging blur in the gloom.
Sun Wolf turned back, weary beyond speaking, to the darkness of Starhawk’s room. The place smelled of old blood, dressings, herbs, and smoke, a sickroom smell he hated. He wanted to leave the place, to find a tavern, get roaring drunk and resoundingly laid, and forget that he was a wizard now, forget that he had responsibilities, forget everything he was and knew. The troop would be celebrating tonight, as he had celebrated with them a score of times, in the torchlight and smoke beneath a city’s broken walls. The memory came back vivid and bloody-golden; rowdy obscenities and violent horseplay blurred behind a rosy-gold screen of drunken well-being, the crazy elation of being alive when others were dead, the heat of alcohol in his veins and the joy of being with friends who understood him, who looked up to him, who had survived hell and fire with him—his fellow killers, Ari, Zane, Dogbreath, Penpusher, and Hawk...
If he turned back and listened, stretching out his wizard’s senses in the louring night, he could probably hear the noise of the camp over the cheap carnival clamor of the town.
He slumped back into the carved chair in the shadows of the bed curtains. He saw the drinking contests, the food fights, the wrestling matches, the nights when they’d bring in and rape all the prettier girls among those taken in the sack, the games of making the captive city fathers run humiliating gauntlets of thrown garbage or grovel for coppers in the muddy dirt of the tent floors, and saw them for what they were—the cruel and abusive sports of victors, hysterical with delight and relief that they were not dead, were not maimed, and were able to do these things to those who had opposed them.
But still he missed the gay violence of celebration and missed the closeness, like a pack-dog missing the smell and warmth and fleas of his pack.
They had left him, and he was alone. He had never before been so aware of what seizing his magic, following the path of his destiny, had done to him. He was no longer what he had been. He could not go back.
Cold fingers touched his hand, then closed around it, firm for all their lightness. Lonely, hurting, he squeezed them in return and, looking down in the dimness, met Starhawk’s sleepy gray eyes.
Chapter 9
THEY SPENT ALMOST THREE weeks in Kwest Mralwe, in a grace-and-favor house near the city wall on the edge of the University Quarter. It belonged to the Stratii and, Sun Wolf guessed, was close enough to the great House of Stratus for guards to be sent if there was trouble... if, for instance, the King or any other member of the King-Council decided to make a bid at acquiring a tame wizard. The house itself had been built by one of the old noble families, who had ruled the land from the time of the Empire. In Kwest Mralwe these ancient clans had mostly married into the great houses of the merchant bankers, though there were some that held aloof, selling the wool from such ancestral lands as remained to them, going formally masked to one another’s parties, and brooding on the injustices of the modern world. Modest by merchant standards and ruinously old, the house was nevertheless perfectly proportioned, quiet, and filled with an antique peace. Its garden was badly overgrown, and Sun Wolf spent a number of afternoons clearing it of weeds, coaxing its tiny artificial springs to run again, and rearranging the rocks that were its bones.
It was a quiet time.
Starhawk recovered quickly, sleeping much, eating well if little—the despair of Renaeka Strata’s second-best cook, who had been lent to them, with two or three other servants, by the Lady Prince. For the first week or so, she had violent headaches, but, once Sun Wolf got her to admit the fact, they yielded to what little healing magic he was by that time again able to work. For the rest, the weather consumed his strength.
Daily at first, then twice, and latterly, three and four times a day and far into the nights he performed the spells and rites. With an obscure caution, he still dared not sink into the deep trance, dared not seek the winds in their own wild quarters, but instead concentrated on holding the dead heaviness of the warm air where it was, over Kwest Mralwe and the long coastline of the north. This took far more of his own energy than guiding the winds did, and, as the pressure of the seasons and of the turning earth built up, left him with a constant, gnawing headache that wore still further at his strength.
Moreover, for each spell, each rite, he had to make anew the full panoply of protective circles, leaving no crack through which evil might come. As the days went by, he grew weary of the tedious ritual of cleansing the long, tile-floored summer dining room and writing the runes of aversion and guard, of light and darkness, in each corner, across each crevice and doorsill and window, knowing that they must all be scrubbed out afterward and all to do again. It was servants’ work, patient and pointless and dull, and the warrior in him raged bitterly against it, as his body had raged at his choice not to take the woman Opium when she stood in his arms.
The gray cloud cover, the dense and louring pressure, held, but he could feel it draining his strength day by day of that first week. There were nights when, working alone in the leaden stillness, the strength of the storms seemed to crush him; dawns when he would emerge, sweat-soaked and shaky, knowing he would have to return to his task within hours and wanting nothing so much as to beat to death the first servant who crossed his path.
This, he supposed, was what it was to be a wizard.
He ate little, for the exertion made him sick. In spite of his weariness, he forced himself to exercise, hacking at a striking post he’d set up in the overgrown garden or throwing the knife or the ax, right-handed, then left-handed, at the far wall of the empty upstairs gallery. He meditated in the crumbling summer house, the thick stillness of the air prickling at his skin, or catnapped on top of the bed’s coverlet at Starhawk’s side, prey to uneasy dreams.
He had abandoned Ari to face the Vorsal mage alone. Protection from the killing storms was the least he could offer by way of amends. There were times when, knees aching from the uneven tiles of the floor, back aching from bending to call forth in chalk and silver and auligar powder the great sweeping lines of strength, the stars of defense, and the closing rings of the vortex of power, he was obliged to remind himself of this fact at intervals of five minutes or less.
On the seventh night, he let the rains begin. Sitting in the window embrasure with Starhawk, their arms locked around one another’s waists, he felt the cold ferocity of the air beat his face and listened to the waters pouring down in the blackness outside. The great bedroom where they sat was in the front of the house, its windows looking out into the street; by the glimmer of oil lamps in scores of windows up and down the rocky hill, they watched the waters churn over the cobblestones in a hurly-burly of brown silk, the air alive with blown rain.
Starhawk’s voice was barely audible in the darkness. “You gave me this night. If it wasn’t f
or you I wouldn’t be here. Thank you.”
“If it wasn’t for you,” the Wolf replied in his rusted growl, “I wouldn’t have the brains to be here either.”
Ari would be somewhere in the Silver Hills by this time, he thought, staring out into the storm; backside-deep in any of the hundred streams and sour ponds that pockmarked that broken land. The memory of the bitter north returned like the recollection of a voice or a face: eroded valleys that had once held the Empire’s farms, now black with standing pines; hillsides that would support nothing but heather; reefs of lichened granite and basalt and rotting lava; and here and there a broken farmhouse, or the crumbling subsidences that marked where ancient mine-workings had been. And back of it all, on the crest of a harsh gray hill that dominated the countryside for a hundred miles around, lay the walled and broken fortress that had once ruled the north.
He wondered if Ari was up to it.
Probably, he thought. If he could hold that band of bastards together through the siege, when every mother’s son of ’em was scared spitless, waiting to see where the curse would land next, he’s sure as hell got the juice to lead them back to Wrynde alive.
And despite what had been said the night before the assault, he smiled, loving that man who was the closest thing to a son he’d ever known.
After that he and the Hawk took some days to explore the city: the wealthier quarters up the mountain where the rain murmured on the pink-tiled roofs just visible above the high walls; the moneyed bustle of the Wool Market and the dye yards behind; and street after steep street of markets under sheets of oiled canvas—whole lanes devoted to silversmiths, or jewelers, or merchants of silk, rare viands, and wine. Sun Wolf bought the Hawk a moonstone earring that stunned her to stammering silence; what she bought for him, in a discreet shop whose clientele was mostly expensive courtesans, delighted and disconcerted him even more. One day they spent wandering the city produce market amid piles of shining melons or fruit imported by caravan from the south, eating buns hot from the baker’s ovens with colorless winter butter dripping down their fingers. On another day, they rode out to the ancient tombs that lay in the hills to the northeast, tombs dating from the years when Gwenth was still the capital of most of the world and not a schism-haunted religious snake pit where a titular emperor’s courtiers engaged in blossom-viewing expeditions in the imperial garden mazes, comparing poems about the moon. Some of the antique tombs had been looted years ago, their melting sandstone doorways gaping like sad mouths. Others, open also, showed the bright chips of recent damage.
“Could that have been it?” the Hawk wondered, picking her way through lakes of gray puddles to the eroded lintel of a small door into the hill. “At a guess some of our boys did this. Here where the chisels went it hasn’t been weathered at all.” She touched with gloved fingers the bright broken place on the lintel and glanced back at the Wolf, holding the horses in the little valley among the crowding barrows, bronze-roofed shrines, and faceless statues of saints. “I’ve heard some emperors used to keep court hoodoos, and gave them tombs in the teeth of the Church. If Zane or Dogbreath were brainless enough to loot one, might they have taken something into the camp that had an ancient curse?”
Sun Wolf frowned, coming to her side to touch the stone, feeling through it for whatever resonances might linger—old griefs, old pride, old hate. But he felt nothing, though whether this was due to lack of skill on his part, the lingering exhaustion of working the weather, or because there was nothing to feel, he could not tell. “It’s a chance,” he said thoughtfully. “The shadow hand I saw might have been an ancient curse, but the voice sure as hell wasn’t. And Moggin was worried enough about the Duke’s suspicion to risk me escaping while he stashed his books.”
Starhawk raised her dark, level brows. “Doesn’t seem to have worked,” she said mildly, “does it?”
On the day after the breaking of Vorsal, before the job of working the weather had turned into an all-devouring vocation, Sun Wolf rode out to the shattered town with a packhorse and empty saddlebags to see what was left of Moggin’s house and in particular Moggin’s library. The house had been burned. In the garden he saw the remains of the child Dannah, her throat cut to the neck-bone, and, on what had been the brick terrace, her mother’s nude and battered body sprawled, squirming with rats. The other bodies in the house—Moggin’s, Sun Wolf guessed, and the older daughter as well as the servants—had been burned beyond recognition. Of that old-fashioned frescoed study, with its tufted blue-and-red rugs and the smudgy lines of the half-finished circles of unholy power, only ashes remained.
Why? he wondered, picking his way through the still-warm piles of blackened brick to where he guessed the kitchen wing lay. Moggin was a wizard, dammit! By the way the soldiers of the watch had acted, everyone in town guessed it. Even given the Trinitarians’ well-known antipathy, stupid and useless as the King might be, his offer of protection was something no father would have turned down.
What had Moggin feared that much?
Gingerly, Sun Wolf picked his way down the wet, dirt-smelling flight of what had been the cellar steps to their turning, and stopped. In the darkness, a sheet of filthy brown water lay beneath him, bobbing with wet, shapeless things—pieces of broken chests, rotted apples from the bottom of some storage bin, and the swollen body of a servant with his nose eaten off. The water shuddered with swimming rats, and Sun Wolf backed up hastily, nauseated by the smell, guessing that the sewer had broken. Disgust and disappointment filled him... and at that moment he heard his horse in the garden let out a whinny of fear. There was a rushing overhead—turning, he saw all the crows and ravens that had been clustered over the bodies burst wildly into the air.
He ran up a few steps and looked around. The rats, too, were forsaking their meal, streaming in a gray-brown carpet toward the shadows of the ruined house.
Among the piled shadows of the broken grain-store next door something moved. He wasn’t sure, but thought he saw the cold glint of daylight on dark metal.
He didn’t wait to see more. He made a dash down the garden, hands fumbling with the reins as he untied the horses, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder toward the black carcass of the house. Remembering the deadly speed with which the djerkas moved, he urged the horse to as fast a canter as possible down the winding streets of the stinking town, trampling corpses in the narrow ways, leaping the half-burned barricades of broken furniture and fallen house beams where the street fighting had been, and brushing past startled looters and those who sought for who knew what among the ruins.
Once he hit the open ground, he spurred to a gallop. He glanced behind him seven or eight times on his way back to Kwest Mralwe, but never saw anything.
But that fact made it no easier for him to fall asleep after he had worked the weather that night.
“You gonna tell me what the problem is, Chief, or you going to worry yourself bald-headed on your own?”
“Worry doesn’t make you bald,” Sun Wolf retorted defensively, running a hand unconsciously over the increasing acreage of open pasture at the crown of his head. “And, anyway, it’s not something I can do anything about.”
Starhawk shoved herself away from where she leaned in the study door and came across to the desk where he sat, put her arms around his shoulders and bent to kiss the three-inch circle of bare pink skin. He cocked his one eye up at her suspiciously as she pushed aside the moldering books and perched tailor-fashion on a corner of the desk. “What isn’t?”
“The djerkas.” He sighed, and leaned back in the great pickled-oak chair. He had been at the desk since after dinner, reading the books of the Witches, as he had every night since the rains began. His hoarse voice was weary. “Moggin. The hex. The fact that even though Moggin’s dead I’m not sure I’m out of danger.”
“From the djerkas?” She leaned an elbow on the stack of books, her white hands lying lightly on the smooth black wool of her gentlemanly hose. A dressing still covered the X-shaped wound and the healing skul
l beneath it; her cropped-off hair was growing back, a glitter of pale stubble, fine as silk velvet in the alabaster lamplight. “Sounds like it’s just wandering around the city like a stray dog. Nobody took the paper out of its mouth, or however those things are motivated. It senses you and says, ‘Hmmm... I remember something about him...’ Obviously there’s some kind of thaumaturgical spancel keeping it around Vorsal, which should make for a pretty entertaining spring once Renaeka Strata’s engineers start building their new wharves.”
“Maybe.” The Wolf’s fingers toyed with tarnished gold on the bindings of a crumbling grimoire. “But the more I think about it, the harder it is to believe old Moggy would sit there and let the King’s bravos skrag his little girl, rather than admit he was a wizard. He was afraid of something, so afraid that at the suggestion his cover was blown, he wouldn’t even carry through the final phase of the curse and turn his magic against the army when it hit the walls. I think there was a second wizard in Vorsal.”
“The one who tried to enslave you?”
“Yeah. There’s times I feel I’m being watched...”
“You are,” Starhawk pointed out reasonably. “The cook sends reports regularly to Renaeka, and I think that new scullery maid is a double agent for the Bishop.”
He laughed briefly. “I hope they all enjoyed the report about what we did last night. But no, it’s more than that. Old Master Drosis could have had more than one student in Vorsal. If that wasn’t Moggin trying to enslave me—and at this point I don’t think it was—I can’t blame the poor bastard for being scared. I’m not sure what I’d do, rather than put myself back in that power.”
“You think our Hoodoo Secundus might have been behind the curse as well?”
“N—No,” he said slowly. “For the simple reason that if the curse was the work of a second hoodoo, he’d have gone through stitch with it and the assault would never have succeeded. I don’t think the djerkas was Moggin’s—if it had been, it would have come to the rescue that last day...”
The Dark Hand of Magic Page 17