The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “Not from you, Puppylove,” she smiled sweetly, the gold bells of her earrings clinking as she straightened. “You give ’em back all sticky.”

  Penpusher tuned a mandolin, which also seemed to have been affected by the curse, and the woman Opium stretched like a cat, as if settling bone, muscle, and flesh into easiness. She began to dance.

  “Yeah,” Zane said bitterly, but he wasn’t looking at Starhawk now; his eyes were following the woman in red. “He managed not to be there when we went into Vorsal, didn’t he?” A sourness tightened his expression, different from his pets and pouts and rages of former days. The hot light in his eyes as he watched the dancer was like fever. “What the hell’s got into him these days, Hawk? He’s not the man he was.”

  “No,” she replied, quite calmly, knowing that in one sense the statement was absolutely factual, though not the sense in which Zane spoke. “And he wasn’t there at Vorsal because he was taking care of me.”

  That broke into his hostile silence. He glanced back at her, with a look of comical apology, and for a moment he was the man she had known. “See the Amazing Foot Swallower in Action.” He grinned and patted her hand. “But still, he could have... I don’t know. Two years ago he’d have figured put some way to save you and be there for us.”

  Starhawk said nothing. She wasn’t about to argue over events during which she’d been unconscious, but she was familiar enough with Zane’s view of the world to know that the man habitually spoke without facts or evidence, only from his wishes, and his instinctive knowledge of what would sting. Ten years ago Sun Wolf might have tried to do two things of the sort in too short a time, but she was willing to bet that one, or perhaps both, would have failed.

  Instead she said, “You made it through Vorsal, didn’t you?”

  He made a dismissive sputter, his gaze locked on the dancer again, his lips half-parted under the golden mustache which, like many of Sun Wolf’s inner circle, he had grown in imitation of his Chief. He wasn’t the only one staring as if he’d never seen a bosom in his life, either. The dancer was good, moving easily within herself, sensual rather than lewd as she flirted with her gold-embroidered veil. Across the room even Curly Bear, a notorious fancier of boys, was watching; the two or three bravos guarding the dry little man Starhawk guessed must be this year’s camp drug dealer, Sugarman, were frankly admiring, and even Sugarman himself had quit counting his money and his little paper screws of powder. Beside her, the Hawk could hear Zane’s breathing quicken and sensed anger as well as the sexual tension rising from him, almost as visible as the faint curl of steam that drifted from his red cloak and brass-studded daffodil sleeves as the heat of the room dried them.

  When the woman finished and gathered the copper and silver bits thrown to her, Zane rose, pushing his way through the crowd toward the doorway, with scarcely a good-by to the Hawk, who remained, moodily turning her barely touched cup in her hands, thinking about that handsome and arrogant young man.

  She’d known him for three years, fought training matches against him, her skills sharpened out of desperate necessity because he was one of those men who felt his manhood threatened by a woman bearing arms. Off the training floor, he was an amiable companion, generous in buying drinks and scrupulous in his treatment of her, though she had never decided whether this was from genuine respect, fear, or some angle in a game of his own. Once when they were both very drunk he’d asked her to join him in bed, something she hadn’t the slightest desire to do; she’d laughed it off and the matter had passed. An excellent fighter, he’d risen fast to squad-leader and she’d guessed he’d take her place as lieutenant when Ari took over the troop.

  But she’d never quite trusted him.

  Across the room, furious voices rose. Her head came up sharply at the sound. A clumsy-looking, pasty-faced man whom she didn’t recognize—one of Krayth’s old troop?—was waving a helmet under Hog’s nose and yelling. A moment later he drew a knife and reached down to where Helmpiddle lurked guiltily behind his master’s legs. This proved to be a mistake. Hog shoved him back, rising to his full six-foot-three of burly black fur...

  Starhawk got to her feet and began to slip through the crowds for the door.

  She didn’t make it. There was a bellowed oath in the crowd behind her, the sound of boards breaking, and a whore’s scream. Then, like milk too long on the fire, the whole room suddenly erupted into a boiling froth of violence.

  Starhawk swore, ducked a bench one of the dice players swung at Dogbreath’s head, and sprang back to avoid a locked pair of combatants who came tumbling over the top of the crowd at her like mating cats rolling off a roof. A thrown tankard thwacked her between the shoulder blades, the hard-boiled leather bouncing harmlessly off her sheepskin doublet but dousing her in a rain of White Death; Dogbreath’s erstwhile assailant nearly fell on top of her, with Firecat locked onto his back, all her jeweled bracelets flashing, screaming oaths and pounding his head with her doubled fists. Up near the bar, the bard had begun to sing again, a smile of inebriated delight on his gap-toothed mouth, off-key voice skirling into a song of battle while he thumped a foot on Opium’s makeshift dance floor half a measure out of time.

  The noise was incredible. Someone slugged at her, a punch she slipped more from instinct than from thought and returned as hard as she could with a knee in her unknown assailant’s groin. The man doubled up with a grunt. His buddy—such men always had buddies—took a swing at her with an incoherent shout, and she smashed his fist aside and elbowed him, hooked his foot, and dumped him down on top of his friend with an efficiency born of a desire to get out of the situation fast. Then she dived for the door, only to be blocked by a struggling mass of warriors—one or two women, but mostly men, many of them soaking wet from the outside, who had come on the run, drawn by the noise of the fracas.

  She got a peripheral glimpse of three of the camp followers crowding up behind the minimal protection of the up-tipped bar; of Bron grabbing the lamps as Penpusher and a woman named Nails, who was easily as big as he, locked in mortal combat, slammed into the tent pole, making the whole structure shudder; of Sugarman backed into a corner while his hired thugs struggled with what Starhawk could only assume were dissatisfied customers, stuffing his moneybags and little packets of dreamsugar into the front of his robe. Rot this, she thought, and flicked from her boot one of the knives she kept there in defiance of Bron’s primary rule about weapons check. The place’ll be in flames in two minutes, and I for one don’t want to stay for the barbecue.

  She cut a neat slit in the calico lining of the wall nearest her, sliced the canvas underneath, and slipped out just as another jarring wallop to one of the tent poles dumped several gallons of collected rainwater down onto her head.

  At least it washed off the gin. Her boots squishing in the mud, she picked her way over tent ropes and around shelters, the rain pouring over her like a river. There was, of course, no question of going back for her cloak. On her way through the tight-packed maze she passed Helmpiddle, the cause of it all, sniffing interestedly at someone’s armor, propped up to air in the shelter of a marquee. It was not, she suspected, going to be anyone’s night.

  Nor was it. Edging sidelong between two pavilions and ducking yet another guy rope, she heard a woman’s voice raised in anger and a man’s vicious whisper, which she recognized as Zane’s. She hesitated, aware that it was none of her business. Between the tents, she could see what might be two figures struggling in the shelter of someone’s dilapidated marquee. The night was pitch black, but a sliver of lamplight from a nearby tent caught the streaming sparkle of the rain, the glint of the woman’s jeweled plastron, and the gold of Zane’s long, curly hair. Above the drumming roar of water of tent hides, she caught his voice. “You’re damn choosy for a slave whore...”

  Then the sound of ripping cloth, and the woman’s cry.

  Starhawk had gone two strides in that direction when a voice from within the tent protested, “Sir!” The flap opened to reveal the ragged silh
ouette of one of the camp slaves. Zane’s head whipped around, and the woman Opium took her chance, wrenching free one hand from his slackened grip and elbowing him with all her strength in the face. Zane yelled, taken off guard; Opium kicked him viciously in the side of the kneecap and took to her heels like a gazelle, leaving her black silk cloak lying in the puddles at Zane’s feet. With an oath, the golden man whirled on the slave who had distracted him, seized him by the back of the neck and kicked him, hard and deliberately, first in the groin, then, when he doubled over with a sobbing cry, in the ribs, and proceeded to administer one of the most vicious and deliberate beatings Starhawk had ever seen.

  She watched from the rope-webbed shadows, knowing it was none of her business, until it became obvious to her that Zane wasn’t going to stop. Then she ducked the rope and walked forward into the relative open, her boots sloshing in the mud.

  “Come on, Zane, don’t be a bigger yammerhead than you are.” Weapons being forbidden at Bron’s, she’d left her sword back at Ari’s, but stood ready, nevertheless, to go for any of her knives. The look on Zane’s face when he turned to her was one of berserk rage, and, for a moment, she thought that she would, in fact, have to kill this man.

  He mouthed “You...” at her, then stopped, half-crouched like a beast. He was as tall as she and much heavier, but in the camp no one had ever gone after Starhawk without careful thought. She stood on the edge of the lamplight, curtained in the rain, wet streaming down the cropped sparkle of her shorn hair and darkening the sheepskin of her doublet, her gray eyes impersonal and lethal as plague. She seldom fought for the pleasure of it, but she was known through the camp as a quick, vicious, and absolutely efficient killer who would not back off.

  Zane screamed in a voice hardly his own, “You bitches all stick together!” After one final, brutal kick to his victim’s ribs, he turned and stormed into the tent.

  Starhawk did a certain amount of thinking about Zane as she lugged the half-unconscious slave to the medic’s tent.

  Butcher greeted their advent with a stream of profanity, beginning with, “Not another one!” and ending with suggestions which, as an anatomist, she should have known were impracticable without careful limbering up.

  “My heart bleeds for you,” Starhawk remarked calmly, looking around her at the tent—leaky, smoke-filled, and crowded already with the still-bellicose casualties of the riot at Bron’s. She deduced immediately that she had not been the only one to disregard Bron’s weapons policy.

  “Well, put a towel around it and keep it to yourself,” Butcher retorted, tying a bandage around Penpusher’s arm and shoving him unceremoniously out the door. Like a cook skinning a rabbit she ripped the ragged shirt from the back of Zane’s slave, and swore again at the sight of the suppurating mess of old bruises, abrasions, and whip marks of at least four recent beatings.

  “If it isn’t half the women in the camp down with the clap, or pregnant and miscarrying, it’s broken noses and broken heads from the men fighting over the rest of ’em,” she muttered, gently feeling for broken ribs. She glanced up at Starhawk with sharp blue eyes. “And women—Firecat broke that bruiser Nails’ nose over some little tart last week. But it isn’t only that. The troops fight all the time, but usually it doesn’t go beyond fists and maybe a chair. Now it’s serious, in hate or rage. We’ve had more cuttings, more killings—we’ve lost a dozen men since the siege ended, and four more to accidents, stupid things like not bracing a wagon’s wheels before you go in to repair the axle, or not checking the girths on a saddle. And the cuts aren’t healing properly. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She turned the slave over gently and dried his face. His eyes were closed under a soaked tangle of black hair thickly streaked with gray, his forehead corrugated with pain. By the black ring of bruises under the steel slave collar, the chain had been used repeatedly to choke him.

  “If there is a curse,” Butcher added quietly as she worked, “you’d better keep your wits about you, Hawk, and clear off the first time you get a headache.”

  “Clear off where? The Khivas is up behind us. There’s no going back.” She hooked her hands in her sword belt and looked down at the man on the bed. Tears of exhaustion and wretchedness crawled slowly down either side of the delicate aquiline nose, and Starhawk thought she had seldom seem such abject misery on a human face. “Will he be all right?”

  “No,” Butcher retorted, dousing a rag with White Death to mop at the pulpy abrasions on his arms. “Not till Zane gets that woman to haul his ashes for him or somebody manages to kill him. He had two slaves out of the loot from Vorsal, you know. Most of us did. The other one, an old woman—half-starved by the look of her, like most of ’em—died already. And she wasn’t the only slave to have been killed in a rage in this camp.” She cocked an eye up at Starhawk. “It’s crossed my mind to wonder if the mage who put the curse on us at Vorsal is doing this out of revenge. Maybe he—or she—is still here in the camp as a slave, helpless to get out, maybe, but not helpless to take what vengeance she can.”

  “Interesting that you should say so.”

  Butcher had turned away to fetch a dressing, so the soft, rasping voice from the entryway did not reach her. Nor, thought the Hawk, identifying the bare-wire brokenness of it before she turned her head, was it intended to. Glancing back she saw that Sun Wolf had entered the hospital tent, silent as a tomcat, and stood leaning one shoulder against the tent pole behind her, looking down at the man on the bed. The Wolf had clearly been to Bron’s. One cheekbone was cut, and his face and his chest, where it showed through his ripped shirt, bore the marks of fingernails, teeth, and of various makeshift weapons. His eye patch, hair, mustache, and clothes were stained all over with mud and blood and gin. “I was beginning to wonder myself whether he was killed after all, or whether we’d find him here.”

  “Who?” asked Starhawk, puzzled.

  Sun Wolf nodded down to the man on the cot. “Moggin,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  “I’M NOT A WIZARD,” Moggin whispered wretchedly. “I swear I’m not.” But he didn’t sound as if he expected to be believed.

  His hands, long and delicate where they weren’t blistered raw and swollen with unaccustomed work, shook as he pressed them over his mouth, as if to hide its unsteadiness. For a long time he didn’t look up, the filthy curtain of his hair hiding gray-green eyes sunken with fatigue. Ari’s tent, to which they’d brought him, was quiet, save for the drumming of the rain and its steady, irritating drip in the puddles beneath the leaks. Around them, the camp had calmed down. The mercs grouped around the chair—Starhawk, Dogbreath, Ari—with their scratched faces and flinty gaze looked as savage a bunch of killers as could be found from the northern wastes to the jungles of the south, but when Moggin raised his head and looked at them, the Wolf saw no terror in his eyes, only numbed exhaustion and misery.

  More composedly, Moggin went on, “I realize that’s a charge it’s almost impossible to disprove, but it really isn’t true. Drosis left me his books, and some of his medical things, when he died a few years ago, that’s all. All I can say in my own defense is that if I’d had power—any power—I’d have used it to save my daughter. The—the King of Kwest Mralwe...”

  “We know about the King of Kwest Mralwe,” Sun Wolf said, as the scholar’s voice faltered suddenly. “I figured you were lying out of fear.”

  The sea-colored eyes snapped wide. “Fear of what?! Anything the Church could do to me couldn’t possibly be as bad as...”

  “Fear of another wizard,” the Wolf said, his scraped, rumbling voice low. “A soul stealer. He tried to enslave me while I worked one of my own spells. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have let a child of mine die rather than go through that again, since it was good odds they’d kill her anyway. And there was always the chance you might have known something I didn’t.”

  The chain around Moggin’s neck clinked faintly as he looked up, a frown twitching between the dark brows. It was as if, for the first time
since the taking of the town, he was emerging from a state of bludgeoned semi-consciousness. “You’re the man who tried to kill me that night, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re a mage yourself, then?”

  Sun Wolf nodded. After a moment Moggin seemed to remember what he’d been doing when the trouble had started, dropped his head to his hands again, and sighed, defeated. “Oh, God.”

  “And if you’re not a mage,” the Wolf went on, “you want to explain those circles you were drawing on the floor?”

  “Do we need this?” Ari said quietly. He glanced across the slave’s bowed head at the Wolf, his gray-brown eyes cold and very tired. “It’s not a question of whether he is or isn’t, but of how much we can afford to risk letting him live. And with things as they fire, Chief, we can’t.”

  Moggin flinched a little, but didn’t look up or speak. Looking down at that bowed head, Sun Wolf guessed that things couldn’t get much worse for him, no matter what was decided. He knew Ari was right. The troop stood on the brink of disaster, and it was clear to him now that the curse, whatever its cause, was far from spent.

  But if this man was a wizard—if he wasn’t the mage whose dark shadow hand had tried to enslave him in its sticky nets of silver runes—he couldn’t let him die.

  And that, too, he saw reflected in Ari’s eyes. It was one thing to refuse to help his men because Starhawk’s life was in danger. His parting from Ari had not been mentioned between them when the young captain, rain streaming down his long black hair, had met him by the horse lines with a bear hug of genuine delight. In a way, both of them knew it hadn’t really mattered.

  This was another question entirely.

  And he knew that whatever he said, Moggin was going to die.

  The worst of it was that Ari was perfectly right. Trapped between the floods, the mutiny that he could feel through his skin brewing in the violence of the tavern and the horrifying plethora of possible misfortunes, they couldn’t risk it. If he were still commander he wouldn’t even be asking the question.