The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

He shook his head again. “Not just now.”

  She hesitated. He was shivering, very slightly—she could see the vibration in all the hanging rags of the robe he wore over his doublet. True, the room was deadly cold; his breath and hers made puffs of frail steam in the amber lamp beams. But white gleamed all around the topaz pupil of his eye; pain and tension there were all at odds with the easiness of his voice. “You be careful, okay?” she said cautiously, and turned away. As she did so she faked dropping the lamp, and stumbled as she grabbed for it, falling to one knee. Cursing, she bent to pick it up and used the movement as a cover to slip a metal-backed mirror from the purse at her belt, angling it toward him as she rose.

  But the reflection showed her only Sun Wolf, standing in the black maw of the arch.

  Troubled, she turned to face him again. More clearly than before, she saw the pain in his eye, grief and horror and a haunted look she had never seen. In spite of the cold that made his breath smoke from his lips, sweat stood out on his high forehead. She started to speak and he shook his head impatiently, and waved her away.

  “I’m fine, dammit.” His hoarse voice grew curt. “It’s just that... I’m fine.”

  For a moment she wondered if he could be covering something to keep her out of danger. That wasn’t terribly like him, but then, who could tell what he might have discovered?

  She decided to trust him and slowly walked back down the length of the gallery, her boots creaking on the worn boards and the echoes mingling with the groaning of the wind overhead.

  The hospital was quiet when she entered it. Men were still working down at one end, mostly those camp slaves who had survived the march north. They were stuffing rags around the patches and caulking them with clay, but the bulk of the work was done. It was warmer here. Braziers dotted the intense gloom with fitful domes of ochre light that fluttered now and again with the sneering drafts, and there were more water buckets around the walls than she’d ever seen. Ari was taking no chances. Down at one end of the room, Big Nin and two of her girls were scraping soiled straw out from under the worse-off patients and replacing it with more-or-less fresh. Earlier that evening, Dogbreath had broken the news to her about Firecat. She glanced over at the bed where she’d spent an hour earlier that day, sitting by her friend. Firecat hadn’t known her. The younger woman’s death was no real surprise to her—still, she felt a bitter pang to see the cot occupied by someone else. Though she hadn’t seen the Cat for nearly a year before they’d met in the dry foothills of the Dragon’s Backbone, for a while it had seemed that they’d never been apart.

  Pushing back the hood from her hair, she walked with instinctive quiet between the aisles of stinking cots.

  Halfway down, Ari was sitting on the edge of Raven Girl’s bed, holding her hand and trying awkwardly to spoon some gruel between her pustuled lips. The dark-haired girl, seventeen and always skinny, was gaunt and wasted as an old woman now, her long hair cut off because of the hospital lice, her face, bereft of it, naked and tiny on the pillow. For a moment, Starhawk stood watching, while the girl dribbled the gruel away and Ari, with infinite patience, blotted up the mess with a rag and spooned up a little more.

  She waited until he finished and had put the basin and spoon aside. He sat blindly staring at nothing for a time in the grimy mottling of the shadows. Then she asked softly, “How is she?”

  He looked up, startled, and instinctively hid rag and spoon under a corner of the sheet. “Better, I think,” he said. “I just came in to see how she’s doing.” He hadn’t known she’d been watching him. “Old Moggy lanced the boils today. It seemed to help.”

  It hadn’t helped Firecat, she thought resentfully, then let the thought go. It could have happened in battle, any of the last six summers. “Have the men turned in?”

  His eyelids creased in annoyance. “Hawk, in case you weren’t noticing, everybody’s had their backsides run ragged...”

  “I think there’s something wrong.”

  An edge of exhausted anger flicked on his voice. “I think there’s gonna be something wrong if I haul a full watch out of their sacks because you think...” He hesitated, then shook his head, rubbed his big hand over the black stubble of his face. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. The Chief... He’s shut up in the Armory—he knows something he’s not telling, I think. Maybe he feels something on its way.”

  At the mention of Sun Wolf’s name something changed indefinably in Ari’s eyes. “When it gets close enough, I’m sure he’ll tell us.”

  “He may want to keep us out of it.” Then, seeing the stubborn dismissiveness in his face, she added, “Ari, don’t be a cheesebrain. If we lose him Mother knows what’ll happen, to you, to her...” She gestured to the sleeping girl on the bed. “To this whole troop. We haven’t figured out what’s behind this hex and I for one don’t want to take chances.”

  “Fine.” Ari jerked to his feet, shaking back his long hair. In the lamplight, his face was still smutted with soot from last night’s disastrous fire, his chest, bared by the torn-out points of his faded shirt, blistered in places from the flames. “I’ll tell that to the men when I haul them out of bed, shall I? Hawk, I haven’t slept more than three hours in as many days and neither have they. You’re getting as bad as he is with this business of looking out for each other, no matter what it costs everybody else.”

  Starhawk studied him for a moment in silence, angry and at the same time aware that they were both far too tired to be having this discussion. She, too, had only had a few hours of sleep between bathing and going back on guard duty. The burns on her own arms and neck smarted damnably beneath the sheepskin and iron of her doublet and the several shirts she had layered on underneath. Her eyeballs felt as if they’d been rolled in sand, her bones as if the marrow in them had all been sucked out, leaving only hollowed straws.

  But the animal prickle of warning at her nape remained.

  Ari sighed, his compact body relaxing a little. “All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll see who I can round up. I’ll get another man on the main gate, and whoever else I can on the walls. But I’m gonna let them know they have you to thank for it tomorrow at breakfast.”

  “Suits me fine if we’re all able to sit down and eat it,” the Hawk returned, hearing under the weariness the anger go out of his tone.

  He grinned under his singed mustache and made her a half salute, both of which she returned. She picked up her lantern beside the door, cursing herself mildly for the wolflike paranoia that would now force her to miss a night’s sleep over something which might not exist.

  And from the darkness of the colonnade, she saw Sun Wolf cross the court.

  She saw him in only the dimmest possible way, for the night was pitch black, the torches that sometimes burned under shelter around the camp long ago put out and the raging sky invisible under a Götterdämmerung of cloud. But the brief stab of her lantern beam and the dim brownish light from the hospital door outlined the massive figure as it made its way from the Armory to the covered colonnade in front of Ari’s house, leaning into the wind, headed toward the main gate. He was muffled in his fur-lined robe with a scarf around his face, but, from the first moment she had seen him, she had never mistaken any man’s walk for his.

  With the clarity of lightning it came to her what must have happened. He had had some sign from the other wizard, some portent, some challenge. He was going to meet him, and had gotten rid of her to keep her out of danger. He was going to meet him alone.

  You gaum-snatched blockhead, after a week fighting the plague you don’t have the magic to light a candle! Furious, Starhawk pulled her own hood up over her head and ran down the pillared terrace of the hospital to intercept him at the gate. The scene in the Armory returned to her. Of course he would have gone there to make his conjuration, some other dark spell from the Witches’ books... He hadn’t wanted her or Moggin to know. Damn cod-proud pigheaded clodhopper...

  Wind buffeted the lantern from her hand as she left the
sheltered colonnade. She cursed perfunctorily, whirled around and half blinded by the sleety gusts. She struggled on, followed the hospital wall by touch toward the thin slip of the gatehouse light. If the Wolf got out onto the moors before she reached him, she’d never find him until it was too late. Wait for me, you brainless barbarian oaf...

  She reached the Gatehouse just in time to see him slit the guard’s throat.

  The man had obviously been totally unprepared. He’d risen, leaving his weapons—sword, crossbow, and throwing ax—on the bench with his cup of White Death to greet with a grin the man whom they all still half regarded as their Chief. Sun Wolf had grabbed his hair with one hand and slashed his throat to the neckbone with the dagger he’d held in the other; from the blackness of the gateway shadows Starhawk could see, through the burst of flying blood, the nacreous white of the spine. The Wolf threw the spasming body down casually and went to unbar the gate.

  “Chief!” Starhawk yelled.

  For the first confused instant she had the impossible, irrational impression he was going out and wanted no one to know. But when he turned, caught up the guard’s ax and flung it at her straight and hard, she knew. The reflexes he’d trained into her were the only thing that saved her—that, and her paranoid readiness. The ax whizzed close enough to her chest to snag her metal shoulder plates as it went clattering into the dark beyond the squat arch of the inner gate. Then the sword was in Sun Wolf’s hand and he was coming for her, cold murder in his eye.

  Her body, her instincts, thought for her. She ducked through the gate into the square behind her, the wind ripping at her as she jerked her sword into her hand. But he didn’t come through the arch at her heels.

  The next instant she heard the scrape of the great gate bolt, and the echo of men’s voices in the low barrel vaults.

  There was no time to stop and figure out what was going on, and she didn’t try. She raced back up the pitch black of the colonnade, yelling Ari’s name at the top of her lungs, but the howl of the sleety wind tore the sound from her lips and whirled it away into the darkness. Men were running after her from the gatehouse, racing along the walls in all directions. And she saw then that Ari and his supporters, exhausted, ill, debilitated by plague and hunger and the most incredible chain of misfortunes ever strung together, stood not a snowball’s chance in hell.

  She smashed through the hospital doors a few scant minutes before the first of the attackers did, yelling for Ari, but he was already gone. At the same moment shouts began from the jumbled barracks quarters, the shrieks men might make when their throats were cut in their beds mingling with battle yells and screams. Footsteps pounded the terrace bricks behind her and she flung herself down in the nearest vacant bed, rolling the pestilent covers, the stained and gummy sheet, up over her head as half a dozen men slammed through the door.

  Sun Wolf was with them, sword in hand and nothing in his eye. The guard’s blood covered him, even his face—his eye stared through it, yellow within red, his teeth white as a beast’s under the gore dripping from his mustache.

  Beside him was Zane, crooked-nosed, gap-toothed, panting and grinning through an ice-covered golden beard, and Louth and Nails.

  And with them was the gray-cloaked form of the drug dealer Sugarman, his fur-lined hood flung back and his face in its frame of wispy gray hair calm and prim and naggingly familiar.

  She’d seen him before, in Bron’s mess tent the night of the riot. And it wasn’t, she realized now, the first time she’d seen him, either. She wondered why on earth she hadn’t recognized him then as Renaeka Strata’s treasurer Purcell.

  Then, with an almost audible click, many things fell into place in her mind.

  Of course you wouldn’t recognize him if he was a wizard, you dummy.

  And of course no one in his right mind, using Zane as a tool, would do so without coming along to make sure he didn’t go off on some witless scheme of his own.

  Oh, Chief.

  Because it was obvious to her now, from the glazed, unseeing coldness of his berserker eye, that what he had feared had happened. The dark hand had seized him—Purcell’s hand. He was its slave.

  “Check the other room,” Zane ordered briefly. Louth and Nails ran off between the beds, swords in their hands. From outside, over the howling of the wind, the yells of battle skreeled against the shriek of wind and sleet. Starhawk hoped Ari had managed to rouse most of his supporters in the few minutes between her speech with him and now. “What about them?” He jerked a hand casually at the figures in the beds.

  Purcell shrugged. “They’re helpless for the moment,” he said in his crisp voice. He peered down at the deliriously tossing Big Thurg, his expression that of a buyer gauging an ox at market. “When we start the alumstone mines again, we’re going to need slaves to work them—with the negotiations with the King-Council in secret, it’ll be nearly a year until we’ll have money to buy workers, let alone the power to protect ourselves. Later we can decide who’s worth keeping.”

  Alumstone? she thought. What the...?

  She’d been debating about passing herself off as a plague victim—it would be disgusting, but, having had a milder form of the disease in her childhood, not particularly dangerous—but that decided her. As soon as Zane and his party left, Sun Wolf following docilely at the imperious snap of Purcell’s fingers, she slipped silently from the bed, pried aside one of the makeshift canvas patches over the ward’s walls, and, hugging the walls in the sightless chaos of wind and struggling forms, crept through the darkness behind the hospital toward the Armory, circled toward the training floor and Sun Wolf’s house behind. In the swirled glare of cressets, she could see fighting on the Armory’s rickety steps, Sun Wolf and Zane like gods of blood and gold hacking at the defenders.

  There was nothing of any strategic importance at the training floor; when she reached it, the vast, barnlike building was silent. Only wind echoed between its high roof and the crisscrossing lattice of rafters that filled the tall spaces beneath.

  There were no grapples there, but there were ropes-thin ones, for jumping over or ducking under or learning various forms of escape. Starhawk tied a dagger at one end to give it enough weight for a throw over the lowest beam. She had pulled off her boots, hood, breeches, and doublet, which were all soaking wet from the rain and sleet, in the porch, and now shoved them deep into the cedarwood chest from which she’d taken the rope. She might freeze, she thought grimly, but she wasn’t about to be betrayed by water dripping down from her hiding place; she thanked the Mother she didn’t have enough hair yet to worry about. The rope looped over the beam gave her purchase enough to walk herself up one of the four freestanding master pillars, weapons belts draped around her shirted form. Coiling the rope neatly, she hauled it up after her, and thought again, Alumstone.

  Alum was the foundation of Kwest Mralwe’s economic power and of Renaeka Strata’s fabulous wealth. It was the monopoly the Lady Prince’s mother had given her life to control and that any other member of the King-Council would give a lot of other people’s lives—if they were cheap, like those of the citizens of Vorsal or the members of the troop—to break.

  So THAT’S what they used to mine at Wrynde!

  Like most of the men, she’d thought—when she’d thought about it at all—in terms of gold, silver, or gems, not in terms of economic advantage, of politics, or of trade. But she knew Sun Wolf did.

  Up under the slates, it was warmer than she’d thought, and the rats kept their distance from her smell, though she could see them in the darkness under the other beams, glaring at her with hateful red eyes.

  Pox rot you lousy rodents, she thought. If I live through this I’m buying a cat.

  She lay stretched out on the two-foot beam, listening to the chaos outside.

  It didn’t last long, not nearly as long as the sacking of some cities she’d participated in. Ari had a few minutes, she told herself, with a kind of chilled desperation. He has to have waked some of them. They had to have some kin
d of chance.

  But Zane, she knew, would never let Ari or his closest supporters survive, no matter how much Purcell wanted slaves for his new alum-digging enterprise.

  She spent a good portion of her time on the beam reviewing every oath she had ever learned.

  The Mother loved her children, Sister Kentannis used to say. But the Mother did not consider pain and death as things to be avoided and so, out of that love, she never spared her children those experiences. Sun Wolf must have been under Purcell’s power already in the Armory. Her thoughts raced, sorting through possibilities. Could he be freed of the spell that held him? Or had it eaten out his brain, never to be restored?

  She did not even think, I will kill Purcell. It was a thing which went without saying that, as far as she was concerned, Purcell and Zane were dead men.

  It was to the training floor that they came, when the camp was taken.

  Zane, bloodied to the elbows, wet and filthy, was grinning with such spiteful triumph that Starhawk guessed he had caught and raped Opium sometime during the fighting. Louth, Nails, and the other bandits and mutineers were ragged and dirty, blood in their hair and in their beards, those that had them. Purcell, though demure and quiet, had shed completely the air of frightened subservience under which he must for years have concealed his powers from Renaeka Strata and the other members of the King-Council. There was something ugly about that primness now, something cold and self-righteous and absolutely amoral, as if he could not conceive what was wrong with provoking a declaration of war in the Council in order to lure an inconveniently placed mercenary army into his trap. His slim body had every bit of Zane’s air of pleased smugness, blood and mud saturating the hem of his warm robe where his gray cloak had not covered.

  Sun Wolf walked at his heels. The rain had washed most of the blood off him and replaced it with mud and filth. He didn’t seem to notice. In his grimed face, his one yellow eye burned cold and calm as an animal’s, and the straps of his eye patch left white stripes on the dirty flesh. There was nothing mechanical about his stride, nothing of the brainless nuuwa or the shambling gim—the zombies of northern legend. He looked pretty much as he did after any siege, alert and deadly, like some big, restless animal ready to kill.