The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “If it could,” the Hawk put in. “He might have locked it up or put it to sleep when you blew him to the Duke.”

  “Maybe.” The Wolf grunted. “But remember that according to Purcell, Moggin wasn’t the only man in the city suspected of witchery. There was the woman Skinshab, and there might have been others. They were interested enough in keeping anyone from sneaking into Vorsal, but obviously didn’t give two hoots about their neighbors—and considering how wizards get treated in these parts, I don’t blame ’em. Wizards have a way of surviving sacks, if they keep their heads down, and coming out of them damn rich, if they’re smart.”

  “So it wasn’t your blowing Moggy to the Duke that kept him from fighting off the final assault,” the Hawk said thoughtfully. “It was fear of this other wizard, whoever it was.”

  Sun Wolf nodded, chewing on the corner of his mustache. “I think so, yeah. If the shadow hand can find you, trap you, when you work in deep trance, it could account for why he’d just slap a curse on the troop and hope for the best... And it damn near worked, at that. You know Krayth of Kilpithie’s men mutinied the night before the assault? Krayth was killed...”

  “Damn,” the Hawk said briefly. She, too, had known and liked the cynical Easterner. “So this second wizard—that woman Skinshab or somebody else—is still out there someplace with the djerkas?”

  Sun Wolf nodded. Outside the rain made a soft, steady rushing against the plastered house walls, and purled faintly in the garden streams. A chill draft made the lamp flames curtsy in their bowls, and the flicker of it danced like chain lightning down the small silver buckles of Starhawk’s doublet. “Why do you think I spent half my time putting every spell and circle of guard around me before I touched the weather?” he asked softly. “Why do you think for the last two weeks I’ve kept damn close to town?”

  “Hence the books?” she asked, waving at the stack beneath her elbow, and the others strewn around the tabletop at her back.

  He whispered, “Yeah.” He touched the grimoires and demonaries beside his hand, crumbling tomes he had stolen from the wizard Kaletha’s snake pit, books which she had stolen in her turn. Like the heat of banked coals, he could feel the spells within them, a shimmering mixture of power, beauty, and evil whose stink turned his stomach. Starhawk, seated casually among them, didn’t seem to notice.

  “Some of the things in those books are evil, Hawk—medicine of the worst possible kind.” He used the word from the barbarian tongue of his childhood, which translated equally as medicine, magic, spirit, God, and madness. “And there’s some spells in them... I don’t understand them as I should. I don’t know if they’re safe to work or not. Safe for me, for my spirit, my mind. And there’s nobody to tell me whether I’m being a wise man or a coward. I know that difference in battle, in a fight, and in a siege. I know what’s safe and what’s stupid. I don’t know it here.”

  “And I take it,” she said, two steps ahead of him as usual, “that the spell you’ve found that’ll show you this wizard is one of those?”

  He sighed resignedly. “Yeah, pox rot it.”

  They had to wait three days, for the dark of the moon, which in itself made the Wolf vaguely uneasy, for several of the moon-spells Yirth had taught him had contained warnings of hidden peril. The ritual was an odd one, from the most ancient of the Wenshar grimoires, its faded instructions jotted in a curious book hand characteristic of the court of that accursed matriarchy which lay open to several interpretations. All the magic in that volume had a different feel to it from those of the other books, different as the “hand” of silk is different from that of wool, and it required some odd things, including straw plaited in certain ways and the skulls of seven children, though two hours’ ride and a little searching were all that were needed for that. In eighteen days the rats and ravens had done their work. Setting those pitiful bones in place on the ritually cleansed and protected tiles of the long summer dining room, Sun Wolf felt an obscure desire to apologize to their parents for what he had done.

  Starhawk settled herself, drawn sword across her knees, in the center of the small Circle of Protection at the far end of the hall, the tiny lamp beside her casting its upside-down shadows over the gaunt bones of her face. Sun Wolf, book open in his hand, knelt before the empty divining bowl and took himself carefully down into the state of dark and moving meditation in which magic begins, reaching with his mind for the signs of power visible only in the moon’s veiled dark.

  But in the bowl’s darkness he saw nothing, and felt no magic touch him.

  It took them four tries before they got any result at all.

  “Dammit, it’s one of those spells that works from assumptions they don’t bother to tell you!” the Wolf raged, scrubbing out all the laboriously written signs. “It could be one of those spells that won’t work if you’re not a virgin, or won’t work if you’re a man...”

  “Well,” Starhawk said promptly, “I vote against doing anything about that right now. Why don’t we get rid of all the iron in the room and try again?”

  Cursing his own lack of training—cursing the dead Wizard-King, for murdering anyone who could have taught him things like this—Sun Wolf began the ritual again, again with no result. Next Starhawk left, much against Sun Wolf’s better judgment—he felt an obscure sense of danger in the night, and wanted her firstly in his sight, so he could protect her, and secondly at his back, so she could protect him. But the result was again nil.

  It was not until he had ritually cleansed the room again, and set up the skull circle without tracing the glimmering hedges of the runes of ward and guard around the room, that the empty bowl before him seemed to fill with darkness, that strange, clear darkness in which his wizard’s sight saw vividly as in day.

  With a cry he struck the bowl aside. It skated across the floor, knocking one of the skulls spinning so that the stub of candle fell out of it and rolled. The other little skulls, candles still burning within, seemed to watch with intent demonic gaze. The clay bowl smashed against the wall with a shocking clatter; Sun Wolf whirled on his knees as a dark shadow loomed over him, then settled back as he realized it was Starhawk, drawn sword in her hand.

  “What is it?” She set the candle upright again on the tiles. The dance of its light seemed to put eyes in the empty sockets of the little skull, where it lay on its side some distance away and caught a glint like a sword blade on the glassy red of the pottery shards. Beyond the archways, the garden lay invisible, the rain’s steady growling filling the night. “What did you see?”

  “Only the hand,” he whispered, his breathing still unsteady.

  It had been tracing silver runes.

  That night he dreamed about the empty pottery bowl filled with darkness. The cracks where it had been smashed to pieces against the wall showed clearly, and darkness leaked through them like smoke, to crawl out along the floor tiles of the empty dining room and seep around the seven little skulls with the candles burning inside. Dimly, Sun Wolf knew that couldn’t be. He’d thrown the bits of the bowl into the kitchen midden, had put those seven skulls in one of the potting sheds and drawn the Circles around them, Light side inward, just in case. I should have checked, he thought vaguely. I knew I should have checked.

  But what it was that he should have checked he wasn’t sure.

  He woke shivering, a sense of panic struggling in his chest, perfectly aware that the dream was only a dream, but terrified that, if he should get up now and go to the dining room, he’d see the bowl there, the darkness pouring from it to cover the floor like ground fog, the little skulls grinning their accusation at him with their glowing candle-flame eyes.

  It was still dark. He had heard the bells of the Trinitarian cathedral chiming midnight just before he’d started the ritual for the last time, and it must still be an hour before dawn. Moving carefully so as not to wake Starhawk—who slept more soundly since her illness, anyway—he slipped from beneath the bedcovers and collected a wide, fur-lined robe from the lid of the
chest next to the bed. It billowed gently around his naked body as he moved on bare and silent feet down the worn oak of the corridor, his eye seeing, as a wizard’s do in the dark, all things in a queer violet shadowlessness—the graceful wall niches with their spare statuary which, to his barbarian tastes, looked so insipid, the delicate shaping of door arches, and what little furniture there was. Outside the rain had eased. The sense of having forgotten something, of having known what to check and passed it by, lingered naggingly in his thoughts. For some reason he had the impression of a smell of straw in the air... coming from the dining room downstairs, he thought, faint but very clear...

  He was two steps down the wide curve of the stairs when he slipped. It was something anyone could have done, descending stairs in the dark, even a night-sighted wizard with the preternatural reflexes of a lifelong athlete. It was only his reflexes which saved him. Afterward, he wasn’t sure how his feet happened to jerk out from under him, though the sensation was exactly as if one ankle had been seized from below at the same time someone had thrust him hard between the shoulders. His body was thinking, even as he fell, twisting in the air to grab for the banister. He was moving with such force that his torso swung sideways, colliding with the steps hard enough to leave him breathless and bruised as he caught the polished beechwood of the posts. It was his swearing as much as the thud of the fall that brought Starhawk running to the top of the stairs.

  “Stop!” he yelled, hearing the barely detectable pat of her bare feet above him. She halted, trained to instant obedience of his voice in battle.

  “You okay, Chief?”

  For answer he expressed himself at some length, while climbing painfully to his feet and pulling the robe around him again. He saw her in the dark, naked and beautiful as the death goddess, sword in one hand and knife in the other, a few feet from the top of stairs. The bandages made a pale slash in the gloom. “And no, I’m not okay.” He limped up to her, pushing his thinning tawny hair back from his face. “I fell down the goddam stairs.” They looked at one another for a long time in silence.

  “You feel all right to travel in this weather?” Sun Wolf glanced sidelong down at the woman jostling through the crowds in the Steel Market by his side. Except for being thinner—and the close cut of the black doublet and hose she wore these days disguised that for the most part—and the cropped hair, which at the moment was mostly hidden by a tall-crowned hat with a cocky feather, Starhawk looked pretty much as she always had, like a killing weapon wrought of peeled bone and alabaster. He knew she still tired easily, though today, wandering through the stalls of the smiths and scissor grinders and weapon makers, some of the cool golden pinkness had returned to her cheekbones.

  “Well, naturally I’d like to stay here and nurse my rheumatism all winter by the fire.” She shrugged and glanced up between the crowding houses and tenements at the gray millrace of the sky. It wasn’t raining for once, but, by the smell of the wind, it would be by nightfall. “But since, if you got killed, there’d be nobody to make coffee the way I like it, I guess I’ll force myself.” They split to pass on either side of a fat woman selling wheat-straw amulets and Saint’s Eyes from a blanket in the middle of the street, the bright-colored tangles of yarn and bead and bone like primitive flowers against the drab gray-yellow of the street and the buildings. Though officially disapproving of such holdovers from the days of the local sorceress-gods, the Church knew better than to try and root out such things. “Let’s not go back to Wenshar, though,” she added, putting a languid hand to her brow. “The desert air’s so hard on my complexion.”

  “I didn’t mind the desert air so much as the ants,” Sun Wolf remarked. “We could head east over the mountains or up to the Marches. Grishka of Rhu owes me some favors, and the Goshawk should still be hiding out in Mallincore, if you don’t mind garlic and heresy for five months...”

  “Chief,” said the Hawk softly, “we’re being followed.”

  Sun Wolf stopped at a knife seller’s stand and held a shining bodice dagger up for inspection and to look at the crowd behind him in the mirror of its blade. “Which one?” The relative niceness of the morning had brought citizens, virtually house-bound for the past two weeks by the unstinting storms, out in droves, and the Steel Market was crowded with servants in livery, beggars in rags, students in their gray gowns, and bourgeois gentlemen in the familiar black, white ruffs of varying width and extravagance nodding like dandelion puffs around their strangulated throats. But before the Hawk could reply, he spotted their shadow, cloaked in black and disguised in a blue learner carnival mask, lurking ineptly behind the ornate iron pillars of a public urinal. The cheap rings and the ancient opal signet were visible even in the chancy surface of the knife blade, and the Wolf swore under his breath.

  “Right,” he muttered, thanked the knife seller, and jostled on his way, turning out of the Steel Market and down a narrow lane that led back toward the river. Starhawk, tilting her hat at a casual angle and fingering her sword hilt, strolled at his heels. The lane, one of the hundreds that crisscrossed Kwest Mralwe’s lower quarter like ant tunnels, ran between the high wall of a merchant palace and the grounds of an ancient chapel built, it was obvious, to honor the Mother and later taken over and refurbished when the Trinitarians had ceased to be regarded as heretics, began to be called the New Religion, and started persecuting heretics on their own. The inhabitants of the tenements of both sides had taken over the tiny square of waste ground before its crumbling porch as a drying yard and pasturage for their pigs, and Starhawk stepped deftly behind a tree full of patched sheets to wait while the Wolf strolled farther down the lane.

  The black-cloaked man ducked around the end of the lane and tiptoed swiftly along it, hugging the wall and obviously hoping the Wolf wouldn’t turn his head at an inopportune moment. Casually oblivious, Sun Wolf stepped around a corner and flattened to the moss-stained wall. The King of Kwest Mralwe emerged at a high-speed skulk a moment later and was seized, slammed against the wall, and unmasked before he had time to so much as gasp for breath. Starhawk materialized a moment later, effectively blocking his flight.

  “There something you want to say to me?”

  “I...” the King gasped, and then, a moment after the Wolf released the bunched shirtfront he held, commanded, “Unhand me!” That already having been done, he straightened his sorry ruffles and looked from one to the other with resentment in his watery eyes. “It was necessary to meet you away from That Woman’s spies,” he declared, pushing back the dark hood from his face. “They are everywhere, even in your own household...”

  “Yeah, the cook and the scullery maid.” Sun Wolf folded his heavy arms and regarded the King narrowly.

  The King cleared his throat. “Oh, so you know,” he said lamely. Then, regaining his dramatic tone, “Then you know that you only exist here on her sufferance, that whenever she chooses, she can place you under arrest, have you imprisoned, or murdered, as she has others before you.”

  The Wolf glanced sidelong at Starhawk, though neither’s expression changed.

  “I sought you out to offer you my protection again, against her, against her servants, and against the Church that she carries like a bauble in her reticule. Can’t you see the evil of That Woman? She rules this city! Now that we’ve conquered Vorsal, she’ll have more power, and more, as other cities come under our sway. It’s only a matter of time before she offers you a choice—servitude to her, or death...”

  “Like the choice you offered Moggin Aerbaldus?” the Wolf asked quietly.

  The weak eyes shifted under his and the pettish mouth grew spiteful. “A useless liar,” he spat irritably. “Cowardly, whining—I told him I’d protect him! He wouldn’t even light a fire, wouldn’t even admit that he could! Just like that filthy old hag in the Gatehouse Quarter...”

  “Skinshab?” the Wolf asked, and the pettish gaze darted back to him.

  “Worthless bitch! Claimed she wasn’t a witch, either, though all the neighbors knew she was. Sh
e’d witched their children during the siege, so they all died... She even admitted it! They told me so, after the old harridan had locked herself up in that hovel of hers...”

  “And did you kill her,” the Wolf asked softly, “as well?”

  “She deserved it,” the King flared. “We torched the house—gave her a taste of the hellfire she’d go to when she refused to come out! I thought it would drive her out,” he added, with a little sigh, the viciousness fading from his eyes and leaving them again slack and a little puzzled. “Or that she’d use her magic to put the fire out. So you see,” he added, reaching out one limp hand to touch the Wolf’s crimson leather sleeve, “you’re the only ones. And believe me, it will be only a matter of time before that poisonous virago Renaeka the Bastard turns her attention to you.”

  “Interesting,” said the Wolf, as they made their way back up the hill toward the comfortable little house with its faithful troop of servant-spies.

  “Last night could have been an accident, you know.”

  “You care to place a small wager on that?”

  She said nothing, and they walked in silence for a time, the first, faint patterings of rain beginning to spot the leather of the Wolf’s doublet, and catch like jewels in the frail white feather of her hat.

  After a time the Wolf went on, “We’ve got twelve silver pieces and about six strat worth of copper and bits; we might be able to get another fifteen or twenty from Renaeka if we guarantee we’re leaving her lands.”

  “You want to risk that?”

  “Not really.”

  “There’s always that bronze mermaid in the front hall,” the Hawk pointed out practically.” And the mechanical clock in the study. We could get ten or twelve apiece for them. Would that be enough to keep us through the winter?” Like most mercs, Starhawk hadn’t the slightest idea what household expenses ran.

  “No,” said the Wolf. “But we’ll find something.”