The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  On the white sand of the hearth, raised within an open square of brick benches, the fire wickered softly. He could hear Starhawk’s light tread on the wooden steps that led down into the overgrown garden where the bathhouse was. Cold as the night had been, the first thing she’d done after the flames in the stables and hospital were quenched had been to heat water for a bath. A moment later he heard the heavy cedar door close, and the creak of the oak floor as she crossed at a respectful distance behind him, in case he was asleep.

  He turned his head to glance at her as she folded herself down neatly cross-legged on the hearth at his side.

  “Here.” She tossed him something silver, which landed with a bright, cold clatter on the bricks. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good—I remember thinking that some time ago.”

  “What is it?” He looked down. A stratus-weight silver piece lay beside him.

  “Dogbreath and I had a bet on about what would happen next. I bet on a fire.”

  “I always knew you were a coldhearted bitch.”

  Moggin’s quiet tread murmured on the smooth planking from the direction of the tiny lean-to kitchen. “Thank your esteemed ancestors Dogbreath didn’t win. I believe his money was on a blizzard.” He almost fell onto the brick bench, gray-lipped with shock and exhaustion, and held out chapped and wasted hands to the warmth of the flames. “One can, at least, put out a fire.”

  “Good,” grumbled Sun Wolf dourly. “We’ve got something to look forward to tomorrow.”

  In the rough jumble of furs and padded silk quilts from K’Chin that covered their pine-pole bed that night, he dreamed of Opium. He saw her as he’d seen her first, moving through the harlequin shadows of the burned siege tower with her hands full of the rustling bitter-sweetness of hellebore, the golden chain of slavery winking on her throat and her cloak parting to show the blood-crimson silk of the gown that had been her man’s last present to her. He saw the Lady Prince like a fever-dream orchid in daffodil sarcenet and pearls, laughing as she held out her crystal vinaigrette to him, and behind her like a shadow, a sloe-eyed woman with long black hair, a woman they had said was a witch...

  Then Starhawk woke him, and he returned to the hospital in the sodden dawn, to kneel in the wet drafts whistling through the canvas patches on the charred walls, digging the last vestiges of magic from the marrow of his bones to help the dying.

  And hating it.

  The rain poured down like a misdirected river, dripping steadily through the tenting that patched the roof. Sun Wolf’s hands shook with weariness as he traced the runes of healing upon mortifying flesh, his mind reducing the constellations of power to gibberish with endless repetition. He wondered why he had ever thought becoming a wizard was anything he wanted to do, and wished that everyone in the hospital would die so he could go back to his house and sleep.

  Near sunset, he stumbled out, starving, sick, and lightheaded with fatigue. For a time, he hadn’t even the energy to stumble down the plank steps to the morass of the camp’s wide central square. He could only stand in the gloom of the sheltered colonnade that fronted the length of the hospital, staring numbly out into the damp grayness of the afternoon.

  Across the square, Ari’s long brick house, formerly the quarters of the garrison governor and adorned with a colonnade of broken and obscenely defaced caryatids, was dark. Raven Girl lay in the low-roofed cave of the hospital ward behind him, blistered lips muttering feverish words. To his left, the tall, square bulk of the Armory tower reared itself against the dove-colored sky, surrounded by its confusion of galleries, stone huts, lofts, and walls, with the great, slant-roofed training floor and Hog’s forge half-seen at its rear. Under the faint whisper of misting rain, it looked half-ruinous, decaying, like the ruins that surrounded Wrynde, like the scattered stone villas, chapels, and old mine works that dotted the countryside near the ancient town, or like the world itself, coming to pieces under the pressure of cold and war, schism, and decay.

  He leaned his head against a pillar. Some wizard you are, he thought bitterly. He had put forth all his strength, all his magic, to save Firecat’s life as he had saved Starhawk’s weeks ago, as he had been able to save others’, and ten minutes ago Firecat had died under his hands. They were already dividing up her weapons, her armor, and the garish jewels she had worn into battle. He’d have to tell Starhawk, when she came off guard duty on the walls.

  Whoever wanted them destroyed was going to succeed, in spite of all he could do.

  Across the court Ari emerged from the shadows beneath the defaced carving of the lintel, looking worse than many of the patients Sun Wolf had just attended. His arm was still bandaged, the wound still unhealed. Penpusher followed him, cadaverous in his ruinous black suit, and beside him walked Xanchus the Mayor, a fussy, middle-aged man in a long green mantle trimmed with squirrel fur who, in spite of a poor harvest, hadn’t managed to lose his paunch. Xanchus’ voice floated fruitily in the bitter air: “...may have all the spears, Captain, but you’d be in sorry shape without our mules, our farms...” A stray snatch of wind carried the rest of his words away, but Sun Wolf knew that the next ones were going to be: “...our forges and our brew houses...” He’d heard the whole speech before, times without counting, when he had commanded the troop.

  A flash of red caught his eye and a flash of gold. Turning his head he saw Opium crossing the court, the same skiff of wind tossing wide the darkness of her cloak to reveal the crimson silk. Walking beside her, Big Nin was wearing a gown of the identical daffodil sarcenet the Lady Prince had worn. The madam’s dress was cut narrower, partly to show off the delicacy of her shape and partly because anything that color was literally worth its weight in gold. But, Sun Wolf, supposed, if one owned...

  And his thought paused, like a rising bird pinned suddenly through with an arrow.

  Shutters covered the latticed parchment in most of the windows of his house. In the queer brown dimness, the books of the Witches seemed to glow a little, as they sometimes did with the bluish psychic miasma of what they contained. From the little wash-leather bag beside them, Sun Wolf took the phial containing what little was left of the auligar powder. He dipped his fingertips in it and crossed to the hearth.

  The coin Starhawk had flipped to him last night still lay on the warmed bricks. He picked it up and rubbed it gently, glad that the powder itself held magic; in his exhaustion, even the tiny effort of a simple spell was agony.

  The Eye was written on the coin.

  He fished in his jerkin pocket and found another stratus-weight silver piece, part of the Vorsal front money he’d picked up in one of those rare poker games in which more than a few coppers had changed hands. Faint and greenish, the mark glowed to life across the emblem of the Pierced Heart.

  Standing like a statue beside the banked embers of the sleeping hearth, he felt the rage rise through him like the heat of brandy. If it had been revenge, he thought, in some calm corner of his heart, I would understand. If it had been to keep from happening what did happen—Moggin’s wife and daughters raped and murdered, the city sacked and burned—by my ancestors, I wouldn’t hold it against them.

  But it wasn’t. Part of him was so angry he was shaking, but in his heart lay the cold burn of icy fury, fury that kills calmly and does not feel. Very quietly he put on his ragged mantle again, pulled its hood up over his damp and straggly hair. From behind the door he took a pole arm, seven feet long and tipped with a spear blade and crescent guards, and stepped out once more into the rain.

  He found what he sought very quickly. He’d always known the place was there. They all had: a grubby and sodden complex of pits, trenches, mine shafts and subsidences a few miles due north of Wrynde, among which the stone foundations of sheds and furnaces could still be traced. The rain had eased; clouds lay over the tops of the rolling purple-brown swells of the land like rancid milk. Cold bit Sun Wolf’s face as he left his horse tied, picking his way afoot among the crumbled reefs of broken rock at the bottom of the pit-shaped depr
ession to poke in the corners of what had once been sheds with the end of the pole arm, listening behind him, wary and half expecting at any moment the djerkas to make its appearance again.

  He only found what he sought because he knew what to look for. Beside the round, sunken pit of what had been a brick-walled kiln was a pile of rock chips, with which he could gouge the brick and even some of the sandstone of the foundation walls. In what had been another shed, after a bit of searching, he found buried under years’ worth of mold and filth a few whitish lumps of calcined substance which, smashed open with a lump of granite, left a faint, bitter-sweet taste on his dampened finger.

  “Bastard,” he whispered, more angry than he remembered ever being in his life. “Stinking, codless, murdering bastard.”

  Behind him, on the other side of the dell, his horse flung up its head with a warning shriek.

  Sun Wolf jerked to his feet, pole arm ready, and flung himself with his back to the nearest wall. If he could flip the thing on its back, he thought grimly, it would buy him time to make it to his horse...

  But the scuttering thing of metal and spikes that flashed forth in the gloom from the darkness of the half-collapsed mine entrance didn’t come at him. It went for the horse.

  Maddened, the beast flung its head up again, breaking the tether, wheeled on its hind legs and bolted. His back to the lichenous rubble of the old shed, the Wolf watched in horror as the djerkas whipped over the stones in pursuit, springing with greater and greater bounds until one final leap put it on the frenzied animal’s rump, its hooked razor claws burying themselves in the shoulders. The horse screamed and fell, rolling, hooves threshing, but could not shake off the lead-colored metal shape. Unconcerned, the djerkas pulled its way almost leisurely along the convulsing body to rip the throat.

  As blood fountained quickly out to splatter the colorless landscape with red, Sun Wolf understood what was going to happen—understood, and knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do. There was no time to make any kind of protective circle or rite. In any case his magic was spent, ground away to exhaustion by his endless battle against the weather, the plague, the curse. As the vicious, bounding thing of black metal wheeled and scurried toward him like a monstrous roach, he knew that he couldn’t spare a second’s concentration from it anyway. Hopeless, he braced the butt of the pole arm against the rock behind him, readying himself as he would for boar and knowing either way he was doomed.

  It stopped inches short of the pike, slashed at him with twelve-inch crescents of bloodied steel. As he whipped the halberd blade to catch and pivot the claws, he glimpsed a darkness, a kind of smoke, emerging from the mine shaft which had hidden the djerkas. It snagged at his attention—a shadow hand floating in the twilight, reaching out to him...

  Then that hand was in his mind, pouring like smoke through his one remaining eye, through his skull, through his nerves. As with an inner vision, he saw it flow into his body, the dark hand’s skeletal fingers tracing silver runes as it went, runes that streamed like silver liquid down the screaming fibers of his nerves, freezing to them in tendrils of quicksilver ice. He was barely aware of the djerkas ripping the pike from his nerveless grip; in his numbed, dreaming horror, he could raise no hand against it, nor did he need to. His mind bellowing, twisting in despair against the absolute lassitude of his flesh, a detached part of him thought, No. It won’t be that easy. The djerkas didn’t move—slow and soft, the chuckle of triumph whispered all around him and grew.

  He felt the dark hand flex, curling its fingers around his brain. The whisper of laughter swelled to the roll of summer thunder as the hand stretched and coiled, a black worm now tightening its evil strength like thick and living rope around the fibers of his spine, the silver runes becoming tendrils that lodged, stuck, and clung to bones, bowels, heart.

  The djerkas stepped aside.

  “So, wizardling,” whispered a voice he knew, “now you are mine.”

  Slowly, numbly, in spite of the bonfire rage tearing him to pieces, he dropped to his knees. He fought to scream, to curse, to bellow at the gray form emerging from the dark of the mine shaft, walking toward him with calm deliberation, the silver darkness of runes and power like a halo around it, the shadow hand almost visible, binding him to his new master’s mind and will.

  Chapter 13

  “YOU SEEN THE CHIEF?” Starhawk had to yell the question at Dogbreath, her hands cupped around her mouth to make herself heard over the screaming of the wind. The freezing storm had swept down from the northern hills a few hours after sunset, turning the rain to sleet, the mud underfoot to bitter slush. Looking down into the square from the lee of the gate tower, she could see shadows moving back and forth across the chinks of light below, where men still worked at repairing the hospital and the barns. It made her uneasy. True, there wasn’t much likelihood of an attack under these conditions, but Dogbreath was the only other guard she’d met on her circuit of the wall walk’s dozen stumpy towers.

  “He was in the Armory earlier!” Dogbreath yelled back, the ends of his braids whipping crazily where they stuck out from beneath the several colored woolen scarves wrapped around his neck. “Went there when he came in around sunset. Gods know where he is now!”

  She frowned, peering through the swirling dark at that blind and massive tower. Sun Wolf could, she supposed, be on the trail of some clue as to the hex’s origins, for most of the campaign gear was now stored in the tangled complex of galleries and lofts. Or he could simply be seeking solitude.

  For the last four years of her tenure in the troop, Starhawk herself had lived in one of the Armory lofts. That was after the last of her brief and uneasy love affairs had terminated with her partner’s death in the siege of Laedden. Sleeping there, she’d been aware that men and women, warriors and camp hangers-on, had frequently gone to simply sit in one of those dim little rooms, among crowded shelves and racks, working alone on some project—new straps on a cuirass, sharpening a knife, or throwing a hand ax at a target in the long main gallery—for hours at a time in the quiet.

  But the memory of what had happened in the pink stone house in Kwest Mralwe came back to her, and she felt uneasy at the thought of the Wolf being too long alone.

  Thus, when she came off duty at midnight, she descended the slippery twist of battlement stair and worked her way around the square in the lee of the wall. Leaving the shelter of the crumbling old colonnade, she fought her way against the wind across open ground to the Armory. The only door into the square stone tower and its mazes was ten feet off the ground, low and narrow enough that big men like Penpusher and the Big Thurg had to snake in sideways, and reached by a narrow flight of rickety wooden stairs that shook and swayed under her with the blasts of the arctic gale.

  Inside, the air was still and very cold. The moaning of the wind through the rafters of the lofts overhead was eerily reminiscent of the stone halls of the haunted city of Wenshar, when demons walked in the season of storms. Starhawk pushed the green leather hood back from her cropped hair, and raised the small bronze lantern she’d brought with her to shed stronger light. The Chief, she guessed, carried nothing of the kind. Once you would never have found him without flint and tinder or more commonly a little horn fire carrier filled with smoldering tinder and a couple of coals. He’d been slipping out of that habit as the senses of a wizard had grown in him.

  Metallic glints answered the movement of her light—racks of swords, halberds, pole arms, and the locks of chests and bins. The Armory contained not only weapons and the campaign gear, but most of the fort’s supplies of hardware: nails bought in the south, or salvaged with meticulous care from the beams of anything in the fort that was torn down; rusted chains and scrap that could be loaded into the ballistas; and vast coils of rope like somnolent snakes. In inner rooms, she knew hides were stacked—if they hadn’t rotted, which, given their current run of luck, was more than likely. Near them were rivets, hammers, tongs, cutters, and buckles looted from every city they’d sacked and every
merchant they’d robbed, bits of chain mail which Hog—whose forge nestled round on the west side—could patch in to repair larger hauberks and coifs. Elsewhere there were targets of wood and straw, quintains and striking bags, and all the leather and metal needed for their repair; pack frames, wheel rims, and vast, dark tangles of pulley and cable.

  The muddied scuff of crusted tracks led through the small anteroom to a narrow inner door. Starhawk followed them down a half-dozen creaky plank steps to the great gallery, a long room curtained in shadow where the hacking-posts and targets loomed in shadow like deformed and mindless sentinels. The smell of mildew breathed upon her as she held the lantern high. “Chief?”

  Movement in the darkness brought her heart to her throat. She saw a massive shape in the dark arch at the room’s far end and the flash of one yellow eye. For an instant it was as if she had encountered a stranger lurking in these dark chambers which had but one exit. Her pulse froze, lurched, and slammed. But then she saw that it was, in fact, Sun Wolf, tawny hair hanging in damp strings over his craggy face, eye gleaming strangely beneath the curled grove of brow.

  His voice was slow, its rhythm halting, almost stammering, as if against some strangling impediment in his throat.

  “I’m here, Starhawk.”

  She made a move in his direction, but he threw his hand up and stepped back. “NO!” For a moment she thought he flinched. Then he pulled a dragging breath. “I just—need to be alone.” He rubbed at his eye patch, and went on more easily, “I wanted to have another look at some of the gear, that’s all. I’ve been over every motherless inch of it with mercury, auligar, hyssop and fire, and there isn’t a mark on it I can find. I may be late. Don’t wait for me.”

  “You want some company?” Scared as she had momentarily been—and the uneasiness was already vanishing from her mind—she didn’t like the idea of his being here alone.