The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  Her voice was calmly conversational. “I can hardly wait to learn what.”

  But the decision was taken out of their hands.

  The rain thickened as evening drew on, beating heavily on the windows of the study where Sun Wolf sat, branches of candles blazing on either side of him, reading slowly, carefully through the Lesser Demonary. Its later chapters covered quasi-demons, golems, constructs, and elementals, including those which contained spirits—either human or demonic—trapped or drawn into them as their motivating force. It was an ugly magic, and reading it made him glance up half a dozen times at the faded tapestry window curtains to make sure they were indeed shut. He found references to the djerkas there and other, more disturbing things as well, hinted at in shapeless terms that made him curse whatever careless goon had tossed a torch into Moggin’s library. In spite of the fur-lined robe he wore over his clothes, he felt cold; as the night deepened, every sound in the quiet house caught his attention like the stealthy creak of floorboards at his back. When someone pounded on the great front door shortly after the Cathedral bells spoke the fifth hour of the night, he almost jumped out of his boots.

  Cocking an ear to listen, he heard a servant’s voice and then, muffled by distance and weariness, another that twitched at his stomach with a sinking premonition of dread.

  “...Of course I know what time it is, I had to get in the goddam pox-festering city gates, didn’t I? Now let me see the Chief and quit arguing before I burn down your outhouse.”

  Sun Wolf was on his feet and striding swiftly down the tiled hall toward the two figures that stood, framed in a double ring of lamplight from the sconces by the doors, in the dense shadows of the hall. He was peripherally aware of the light tread and tomcat shadow on the stairs that would be Starhawk, but most of his attention was drawn to the butler’s stiff-backed shape, and, half-hidden behind it, the bedraggled form whose battered jerkin, ruinous sleeve dags, and sopping braids were dripping puddles of water onto the tiled floor.

  “Dogbreath!”

  “Chief!” The squad-leader brushed past the scandalized butler and strode toward him, delight beaming from squirrel eyes in a face almost unrecognizable with filth, a week’s growth of black beard, and the last extremities of hardship.

  “What the hell...?” Starhawk’s voice said from the stairs.

  “Chief, I hate to do this to you,” Dogbreath said. “It’s a bastard of a thing to ask you after everything that went on, but we’re up against it for real. We need you. We need you now, fast. That curse is still on the troop.”

  Chapter 10

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT, Chief.” Ari got up and poured full the cups that stood on the camp table of inlaid ebony—the cups of green lacquer and gold, which, like the table, the tent, the gold-bound staghorn chair to which the young captain returned to slouch, had all been Sun Wolf’s once. Starhawk, sitting quietly on the X-shaped black-oak seat which had customarily been hers, noted how slowly Ari was moving, like a man forced to work at the stretch of his endurance at some hard physical labor, day in and day out and far into the night—a man whose strength is fast running out. In his eyes under the heavy brows she saw he knew it. Outside, rain pounded in whirling frenzy on the canvas tent. Inside, it dripped drearily through a dozen flaws and leaks and faulty seams, making hard little splatting noises on the sodden, carpetless mud underfoot. The braziers filled the air with smoke without warming it one whit.

  “Things went from bad to worse after the sack. We got the hell out of there the morning after we were paid. We didn’t even wait to divvy the take, just counted it and pulled stakes. But I’ve never seen so many things go wrong in my life.”

  The liquid in the cups wasn’t wine. It was White Death, the cheapest grade of gin mixed with hot water. The wine, Starhawk gathered, had all gone rancid in its skins a day or two out of Kwest Mralwe. So had most of the flour they’d bought for the journey to Wrynde, a journey intended to be accomplished in record time and which had, instead, been plagued by every delay known to equipment, beast, or humankind. “I swear, Chief, we broke seven axles in one day!” Ari gestured with one bandaged hand, a wound received in the sack and still unhealed. “After the third one, I personally went through every wagon and cart in the train, and by the Three Gods’ witness, they were all sound! I’ve never been that close to crying and kicking my heels on the ground in my life! And three the next day, and all the time the men fighting over whose fault it was, stealing liquor and bread from each other... Even the slaves we took from the sack of the town are fighting each other! EACH OTHER for Gods’ sakes! Horses and oxen going sick like they’d been poisoned—which I’ll take oath they weren’t—trees falling in our path, bridges out, a bad lot of beer that kept everybody puking for two days... We never even made it over the Narewitch Bridge before the rains began.”

  Sun Wolf was silent, his single eyelid drooping in speculative thought.

  For herself, the Hawk recalled well the inner sigh she always heaved when the troop had passed northbound over the three stone arches of that half-ruined bridge. The Narewitch marked the northern bounds of the Middle Kingdoms. In the twisted lava gorges of the badlands of the Gniss River and its tributaries, the going was harder—swollen streams, broken roads, rockslides—but at least the troop was out of danger of delay by some last-minute permutation of Middle Kingdom religious politics. To her, the bridge had always meant freedom—freedom to rest, to meditate, to train, to be what she was for a winter season before the summer required her to go back to her job as killer again. It was the first familiar landmark on the road home.

  The thunder of the rain increased. Starhawk’s practiced ear picked up the river’s booming—the Gore, not the Khivas, which was the worst of the western tributaries. She and the Wolf had nearly been killed crossing that one yesterday.

  The camp had been set at the high end of a bay in the red-black cliffs, where the brutal chasm of the Gore widened over a rocky ford. The shepherds of the Gore Thane’s Fort pastured their sheep here in the spring, until the herdboys reported the yearly approach of the mercenaries on their way south. The Gore Thane—nominal lord of this barren corner of the badlands—left them alone, and they, in turn, forbore to molest such stray shepherds or merchants as they might encounter. In the spring, they’d be hurrying south or east to whatever war they were fighting that summer. In the fall, when this sheltered hillock was bare of the spring’s grass and the Gore ran low and snarling in the rocky tangle of its ford, they’d be heading north as fast as they could to reach Wrynde before the rains began.

  Once, she remembered, they’d been caught late and had to ford in the first of the floods. Oxen, horses, baggage wagons had been swept away in the white riptide; a man who lost his footing would be pulped against the boulders and washed downstream like a bug in a gutter. No one went after them to see if they survived. Any delay in the crossing would only mean the next river—the Black—would be that much more swollen.

  According to Ari they had been trapped here on the bank of the Gore for the last six days.

  “The storms in the mountains have got to let up sometime.” Ari sipped at his liquor with a tentativeness Starhawk readily understood after an experimental taste of her own cup. “The river rises and falls. It slacked yesterday enough to try a crossing, though it was still higher than I’ve ever seen it. Zane tried going across with a rope to haul rafts. He turned back. There’s seven feet of water over the highest of the midstream rocks and it’s going like an avalanche. We’ve even been thinking about crossing back over the Khivas and heading south again...”

  “Don’t,” the Wolf said, and moved his heavy shoulders against the mildewing canvas back of his camp chair. Beyond the dividing curtain, Starhawk could hear Raven Girl moving quietly about on the creaking bits of planking set up over the general muck. “The Khivas slacked off a little, too, or the Hawk and I couldn’t have gotten across at all, but it was rising already when we were doing it. It’ll be a millrace now. I don’t think you cou
ld have taken wagons over it, even at its lowest.”

  “Pox.” Ari sat quiet for a moment, staring down into his cup, wet, dark hair falling forward around his haggard face. Above the drumming of the rain and the rush of the river, Starhawk could hear quite clearly the voices in the other tents packed so closely around this one—voices arguing tiredly, and somewhere a woman crying with the bitter, jagged weariness of one who has been weeping on and off for days. It made her feel stifled and irrationally angry, wanting to strike out at random. By the smell, the latrines were far too close to the tents, which were themselves jammed together, a higgledy-piggledy mass of canvas and rope, wagons and mule lines on the pebbly hillock, with the river foaming greedily at their feet.

  She asked, “Who’re the others in the camp?”

  Ari shrugged. “About two hundred of Krayth’s boys joined us. They said it was too far back to Kilpithie. I don’t know whether these were the ones who mutinied or who were just sick of the whole thing. Their leader’s a man named Louth.”

  “I know him.” Sun Wolf grunted, setting aside his untasted cup after one sniff. “And if he’s leading them, I’d bet money these were the mutineers.”

  Ari said nothing for a moment, but nodded to himself, as if adding this piece of information to others in his mind, and the lines in his face seemed to settle in a little deeper in the dim flicker of the ridgepole lamps. The Wolf had told her Ari looked bad, but Starhawk was shocked to see how her friend had aged. He’d lost flesh, and there was a tautness to him now, the feverish look of a man living on his nerves. He went on, “There’s singletons and little groups with us, too, some of them from the siege, some of them just freebooters, bandits. Good men, some of them. They don’t make trouble.”

  “Doesn’t mean they couldn’t.” Sun Wolf’s tawny eye glinted feral in the candlelight.

  “Doesn’t mean they will, either,” Ari replied, running one hand over his unshaven face. “And if the river falls back enough to use rafts we’re going to need all the help on this we can get.”

  “You still talking rafts?” a voice demanded from the tent doorway. Looking up, Starhawk saw Zane framed against the darkness, all his modish yellow puffs and slashes oozing rainwater like a drowned cock pheasant. “Give it up, Ari, that river’s not coming down till spring. There isn’t enough timber in this whole camp to float everything over, if it did.”

  “Not all at once, no,” Ari replied quietly. “But there’s enough wagons to run a ferry, if people like your pal Sugarman give them up.” From the cant name and the bite of contempt and loathing in Ari’s voice—and from her earlier acquaintance with Zane—Starhawk guessed that Sugarman must be one of the dreamsugar dealers who were as much a fixture in the train of the mercenary armies as were pimps. Two or three of them had luxurious winter residences in the town of Wrynde, at a discreet distance from Sun Wolf’s camp. The Wolf, though holding them in considerable scorn, had never been fool enough to tell his men what they could and could not do on their own time, but most of the troop knew better than to come to his sessions on weapons training or go into battle under the influence of either drugs or the various sorts of alcohol peddled by the army’s hangers-on. Those who didn’t learned otherwise very quickly, or else ceased to be an issue.

  “He’s no pal of mine,” Zane hastened to say. “But you’d be asking for trouble to try and take his wagon from him. He’s got his own hired boys to guard him.” With a gesture curiously boyish he flipped his wet curls back from his eyes. “Face it, pal, we’re stuck, and the smartest thing we can do is to go with what we got.”

  “No,” said Ari, with a dogged quiet that echoed a dozen prior discussions.

  Zane turned to Sun Wolf. “What about the Gore Thane’s fort upriver?” he asked bluntly. “I’ve been trying to tell this grut for days that we’re stuck and we’re running out of food sitting here in the rain, when the Gore Thane has got a good fort, good defensive position, and a winter’s worth of food and women holed up five miles from here...”

  “...on the side of a cliff,” Ari pointed out, “that we’d lose a third to a half of our men trying to take in the rain.”

  “Maybe we would have,” Zane said, his blue eyes sparkling. “But now we’ve got an edge. We’ve got a hoodoo on our side...” He grinned at Sun Wolf. “Don’t we, Wolf?”

  Starhawk cringed inside at the arrogant brightness of his voice. In the fretted lamplight she could almost see Sun Wolf’s hair bristle. “No,” the Wolf said softly, “you don’t. And that ‘grut’ is your commanding officer.”

  “Aah, come on, Wolf, we’re up against it, we don’t have time for that kind of candy-mouthed hairsplitting now!” Zane protested, though Starhawk saw his glance shift. “We’re all friends, we’ve all drunk out of the same bottle and puked in the same ditch...”

  “That doesn’t make you commander of this troop,” Ari said quietly. He didn’t rise from the staghorn chair, but Starhawk wouldn’t have wanted him to be watching her that way.

  “Wolf...” Zane turned to Sun Wolf again, and met only a stony yellow gaze.

  “And it doesn’t make him commander,” Ari gritted, the harshness of his voice dragging Zane’s attention back to him as if Ari had taken him by the hair. “He gave it up and walked away from it. It’s mine, now, and I’ll tear the face off any man who tries to take it from me. All right?” His brown eyes were hard, drilling into Zane’s. “All right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, all right,” the lieutenant agreed, but there was an ugly flare to his cupid-bow lips. Starhawk saw him sip in his breath to make another remark—at a guess, she thought, something along the lines of Pardon me for letting my humble shadow fall across your path, your Majesty, but wisdom or caution—rare indeed for Zane—intervened, and he turned and strode from the tent, every line of his back and the swirl of his crimson cloak insolent, as if he had spat upon the threshold.

  “Aaah, hell, Hawk, I wasn’t trying to undermine his goddam authority!” Zane took a long pull on his tankard—White Death containing, by the smell of it, far less water than her own. Evidently the beer had blown up several days ago as well. “I trained with him, dammit! I’ve fought beside him. I’ve saved his goddam life, if you want to get technical about it! And then to have him come off with this ‘It’s my troop so don’t ask questions...’ ” He made a gesture of impatience and disgust, with only a little stiffness, a little mistiming, giving away that it had been calculated and rehearsed.

  But then, thought the Hawk, she had never quite figured out how much of Zane’s speech and behavior was ever spontaneous.

  She had tracked him down in Bron’s tavern, whose dozen or so lamps shining through the stained calico linings of its canvas walls turned it, from the outside, into a dim ruby box. Inside, the air was clouded with smoke, the ground underfoot, the benches, the few crude tables, and the plank bar wet, the reek of the unwashed bodies and unwashed clothing of the hundred or so men and women packed shoulder-to-steaming-shoulder unbelievable. Fastidious herself, Starhawk had long grown used to the stench of soldiers on campaign, but this surpassed most of her previous experience.

  It was also noisy, and there was a quality to the sound, a belligerent edge, that made her hackles lift and caused her to be uneasily conscious of how far she sat from the door. Usually Bron opened out the sides of the tent, the tables spilling over into the outside under an assortment of makeshift marquees and awnings. Crowded together like this, Starhawk felt again her nervous loathing of crowds, the irrational desire to find the nearest sword and start hacking, and guessed she wasn’t the only one in the room prey to those sentiments. In the overraucous voices of the soldiers, the shrill, petulant whines of the whores, she sensed the pulse of helplessness and frustrated rage that only looked for an outlet into armed violence. At the cardtables nearby she glimpsed some of her friends—Dogbreath, Firecat, Battlesow, the Goddess, Hog with the notorious Helmpiddle panting happily at his feet. Nobody seemed to be winning much, but they were all taking it worse than usual. Even B
ron, pouring gin at the plank bar, seemed sullen and nervous. As Sun Wolf had warned her, the bard—gap-toothed, unshaven, and clearly drunk already—was comprehensively awful.

  “Come on, Zane,” she said placatingly, “you know you can’t decide things by committee in battle.”

  “We’re not in a goddam battle.”

  “No.” Starhawk turned the wooden cup in her hands. It hadn’t been washed. Bron, like everyone else, must be reaching the stage of weariness where nothing mattered very much. “But we’re in worse danger than any battle I’ve ever seen. If that river rises much more we’re going to be wading.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying!” he protested angrily, and refilled his cup from the leather pitcher he’d brought over from the bar. “We can take that fort! Hell, it’s only a bunch of shepherds, some Mother-worshiping farmers and a two-bit thane...”

  “Who’ll be fighting for their lives, on territory they know,” she pointed out. “In the pouring-down rain.”

  “Rot the rain! We can still take it! Dammit, Hawk, is Ari’s damn chicken-heartedness catching? You’re the Wolf’s main jig these days—can’t you talk him into lending us a hand with it?”

  “Probably not.” The rest of the remark she let pass, having learned long ago that taking issue with Zane’s attitudes would only lead to arguments as time-consuming as they were pointless.

  He made a face. Across the room, the bard had mercifully finished—Penpusher had evidently bought him several drinks as payment for doing so—and was now helping Bron move benches back and toss down extra bits of timber and canvas on the soggy ground. Starhawk saw a woman coming forward, a dancer, shedding back the rain-flecked sheet of oiled black silk that had protected her crimson dress and the raven masses of her hair from the damp. After a quick glance at the mirror she wore at her belt the woman stooped a little, and with a gesture incredibly intimate, incredibly graceful, raised one foot to take off her shoes. From the poker game Dogbreath yelled, “You need help with that, Opium?”