The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  Only he was dirty, where he usually got himself clean as quickly as possible after a fight, and he did not look around him to see who and what was behind.

  “...killed along the walls above the gatehouse,” Louth was saying, scratching his beardless chin. “Damned if I know who did that. We didn’t, that’s for sure. Cut to hell, like they’d been carved up with razors...”

  The djerkas, thought the Hawk, even as Purcell said, “Don’t worry about that. It scarcely matters, so long as they’re dead. What about the others?”

  “Got away,” Zane snarled, and added several obscenities for good measure. “There was more of ’em than we’d thought, and they were awake, too. I thought you said they’d be asleep or sick or fagged out for sure...” The familiar whining tone of blame was back in his voice.

  “I doubt they’ll make us much trouble.” The Councillor tucked slender hands, gloved exquisitely in gold-beaded purple, into the squirrel lining of his sleeves. “In this weather they won’t last long. But their escape means that we’ll have to take the village immediately, tomorrow morning, and not wait for night again. Are your men up to it?”

  Zane grinned. “Granddad, for the kind of money you say we’ll make once we get those diggings going, they’re up to shoveling enough elephant dung to fill the Gniss River gorge.”

  “Good.” Purcell rationed himself a wafer-thin smile. “Remember not to kill the villagers. Every pair of arms will count until the money begins to come in. We won’t be able to rebuild the kilns until spring, of course; but, in my investigations of the last few days, I’ve ascertained that two of the shafts are still workable, or will be when they’ve been pumped out.”

  He looked about him at the shadowy hall, filled with torchlight, the stink of crowded bodies, and new-shed blood. “Not a bad place,” he added judiciously. “I shall take the big house across the square for my own. It looks the most weather-tight. As soon as spring opens the roads, I will be returning to Kwest Mralwe, to allay suspicions and set up imports on that end. It wouldn’t do for the other members of the Council to know where the alum is coming from until my position is stronger, but that should not take long. There are a number of the merchant houses, to say nothing of the old nobility, who would sooner buy alum at my prices than Renaeka Strata’s.” His colorless eyes flicked to the men around them, dirty, beastlike, a gleam of knife blades and teeth in the guttering torchlight. The thin line of his little smile altered, but his voice remained affable. “I’m sure your excellent troops will find tomorrow’s battle considerably easier than tonight’s.”

  “Poxy better be,” Nails snarled, twisting the water from her lank brown hair. “That’s the last pox-festering time I want to march through the goddam snow and fight in the goddam rain. That mother-eating alum mine better pay off like you say it will, pook.”

  Purcell regarded her with the expression of a sober and wealthy bishop contemplating a drunk puking in a gutter, and replied smoothly, “My dear Nails, I assure you it will. And I promise you, you shall receive all that’s coming to you when it does.”

  Zane’s voice dropped, and his eyes shifted toward Sun Wolf. “What about him?”

  “Oh, we’ll need him for the attack on Wrynde, of course.” Purcell’s cold smile widened, and a thin gleam of spiteful triumph slid into his voice. “We have seen the usefulness of having a man they trust. Fortuitous that he came out to the mine, though I’m a little surprised he guessed that it was behind my plan. Still, with his magic weakened to the extent it was, I could have set the geas on him at a distance, or called him to me to do it.”

  Zane glanced uneasily from the Wolf’s impassive face to Purcell’s prim, wrinkled smile. “Can he hear us?”

  “What if he can? There isn’t much he can do about it. Sun Wolf...” With fussy care, Purcell removed one of his purple-dyed gloves and, after a moment’s thought, flung it into the far corner of the shadowy room. Men stepped aside from it, much as they gave the old man himself as wide a berth as the crowding of the great floor permitted. “Fetch it.”

  The Wolf turned and walked quietly after the glove.

  “No.” Purcell’s voice was a hard little rap, like an auctioneer’s gavel. The Wolf stopped in his tracks. “Properly. In your teeth.”

  For a moment Starhawk, lying on the beam, thought she saw the big man’s muscles bunch in anger. Then he flinched and made a thin sound, barely more than a stifled gasp in his throat. Slowly he got down on his hands and knees, picked up the glove in his teeth, and crawled the width of the great room back to Purcell.

  Around them, the men said nothing aloud, but there was a curious, whispering murmur all around the back of the room, which Purcell did not hear.

  “If I told him to swallow it whole he would, you know.” The Councillor removed the glove from Sun Wolf’s mouth and shook it fastidiously. “But purple dye is so expensive. Up on your knees.”

  The Wolf raised himself from all fours to a kneeling position. Someone in the back made a lewd jest, but on the whole, the room was uneasily quiet.

  Purcell struck him twice across the face with the glove, the sound of the wet leather like the swat of a whip on wood. The gold beading left a score of little welts on his cheek under the stubble and grime. “Here.” He handed the glove to Zane. “Be my guest.”

  Hesitantly, Zane struck. Then, gaining confidence, he laughed and struck again and again.

  Someone laughed; Louth shouted an unprintable suggestion about what to do next; but on the whole the men were quiet. Starhawk, though not able to gauge the feelings of mobs as well as Sun Wolf, could feel their uneasiness in the face of magic, their hostility toward this humiliation of another man. Neither Purcell nor Zane seemed to notice. As for Sun Wolf, he never moved. But, looking down into his upraised face, Starhawk could see in his eye the pain, the rage, and the haunted agony of shame and knew that, however strong was the magic holding his will in check, the will was still there. It only remained for her—evading a wizard, a hex, an army, and a metallic monster, she reminded herself wryly—to get him out.

  Chapter 14

  IT WAS NEARLY dawn before the noise in the camp died down. Stretched flat on the beam, shivering with cold in the various layers of shirts she wore, Starhawk had time to do a deal of thinking. The rats kept their distance—she’d swat at them when nobody was in the hall below to hear—but the roaches and spiders didn’t. After all the other events of the night, she barely noticed. Now and then her ears would tell her when Zane’s men had found some other holdout loyal to Ari, or one of the women or boys who belonged to them. She guessed that, once Ari was clearly defeated, most of his supporters simply switched to the winning side, to be accepted but not trusted by the victors. And who could blame them? But Ari’s close friends would never convince Zane they had forsaken the man they’d chosen.

  And she, of course, was dead meat as soon as they found her.

  She wondered how many of their friends knew it had been Sun Wolf who’d opened the gate.

  At dawn she heard the furious half-drunken clamor of the expeditionary force leaving for Wrynde. Reducing the town wouldn’t take them long. It was too far away to; have heard last night’s battle over the noise of the storm, and its inhabitants would be unprepared.

  The rain had ceased almost as soon as the fort was taken, and by the smell of the air that leaked in whenever anyone entered or left the training hall she could tell that soupy mist lay over the barren uplands, enough to hide advancing men until it was far too late in the ruin of old walls and crumbing stream cuts that surrounded the town. The mist warmed the air a little—if it hadn’t, she thought, she would have frozen. Whatever else his abilities, Purcell was a superb weather-witch.

  Zane, Starhawk guessed, would leave a fairly strong force to guard the camp, for in the unlikely event Ari had managed to rally his scattered forces—or even find them, hiding as they must be all over the moors—now would be the time to attack. And it was odds on that the camp guards would be either bandits or Louth�
��s mutineers, since Zane wouldn’t have had time to figure out which of Ari’s turncoats really were sleepers and would therefore send them out to do something safe.

  That gave her the core of a plan.

  She let herself down from the beam as soon as she judged Zane’s troops were out the gate and crossed to the chest in which she’d hidden her clothes. Her bare legs were crimson with gooseflesh—it was colder down here at floor level than it had been up under the rafters—and she put on her soaked leather breeches and boots, wishing it were possible to do so without touching the insides.

  The camp had been her home for eight years, and she knew its every angle and wall. It was tricky slipping across the open ground to the barracks, but the mist helped her, that and the fact that the men, as they typically did in her experience, lingered around the gate to talk and grumble for a time after the main force marched away. She slipped into the back door of Big Nin’s house without trouble.

  The diminutive prostitute wasn’t there; none of the women who lived in this part of the barracks seemed to be. Starhawk could guess why, and it didn’t bode particularly well for her scheme, but there was no time to come up with another. She stripped quickly and pulled on whatever she could find that would fit her—a low-cut bodice of dust-pink silk, a confection of gold-shot skirts, a startling petticoat, sequined turquoise gloves, an assortment of tasseled sashes and scarves. Her boots she left on. She’d be doing rough walking soon, and besides, there was no question of Big Nin’s tiny slippers fitting her feet.

  There were cosmetics on the dressing table and, best of all, several wigs in varying shades and lengths. She selected a red one and arranged it with a sequined scarf in a kind of turban over her cropped head so that they more or less covered the scar on her cheek. With a certain amount of trepidation—since, though she’d seen women do this, she’d never tried it on herself—she painted her eyes and lips and covered with makeup as much of the scar as still showed. The result wasn’t reassuring. The woman staring at her from the warped brass mirror certainly didn’t look like herself, but neither did she look capable of earning so much as a copper by getting men to sleep with her.

  On the other hand, she reflected, neither Filthy Girt nor the Glutton seemed to have the least trouble finding customers. Reassured, she slipped three daggers and her knuckle-spikes into her belt and boots, found a silk scarf that would double excellently as a garrote, slid a little bodkin dagger down her bosom, added all the jewelry she could find, and put a purple cloak of oiled taffeta garishly lined with yellow-dyed fur over the whole business.

  She eyed her tawdry reflection once more and thought, The things one does for love.

  Rancid gray daylight filled the sky now that the fog was burning off. She wondered whether this was because Purcell no longer needed it—once they got to fighting in among the houses in Wrynde, fog would work for the defenders rather than the attackers—or because there was a limit to how long even a skilled mage could hold weather not suitable to the place and season. Through a crack in the window shutter she could see that the camp was returning very quickly to normal. It looked better, in fact, than she’d seen it since their return, with more guards on the walls and more men and women moving about between the buildings. So instead of gliding by stealth, she moved with purposeful unobtrusiveness across the blood-patched wallow of the west end of the square to the kitchen, where white smoke signaled the first meal of the day being doled out to all comers, warrior, camp follower, and slave alike.

  Two of Zane’s guards stood by the door, but neither glanced at her when she went inside. The eating hall, a long, low, rather smoky room, was half-filled with people sitting at the rough benches, mostly camp slaves under the eye of another man she didn’t recognize—who must therefore be one of Louth’s—and a tawdry gaggle of camp followers sitting chattering together at one table. More warriors were up around the swill pots where Hog and Gully were handing out beans and bread and thinned-out gin. Hog was expressionless, the set of his shoulders almost shouting, “I don’t give a rat’s mess who runs the damn troop, but stay out of my kitchen.” Gully’s nose was swollen and his sad eyes both blacked. His fingers, wrapped in bandages, had all been broken. The Hawk gritted her teeth. As often as she’d wished while he was singing that someone would do something of the kind, it had never been more than a facetious remark. Of Bron there was no sign, and she wondered if he’d tried to defend Opium against Zane.

  One thing at a time, she told herself. If you try to help everyone, you’re going to end up caught yourself. Feeling hopelessly conspicuous, she walked up to the front of the room, keeping her eyes down, and got a bowl. If Hog recognized her, he gave no sign of it, and Gully murmured casually, “Hi, Angelcakes,” as he handed her a mug of wretched tea with clumsy, splinted hands. She took her food into a deserted corner of the big, damp room, and rapidly deduced that whatever else was going on, the curse still reigned in Hog’s kitchen.

  There she waited, watching people come and go, until another group of slaves entered to be fed, among whom she recognized Moggin.

  He was thinly clad against the cold, coughing heavily in a way she deeply disliked. He must have slipped himself into one of the camp slave gangs, as he had, he’d told her, in the confusion of the sack of Vorsal. His bare arms, like those of the others of his group, were plastered with mud and sawdust, from which Starhawk guessed they’d been put to work repairing the burned section of the barracks for the benefit of the newly come conquerors. She waited until he’d gotten his food and walked to another deserted table to eat it, moving slowly, as if in pain. Then she got up, fetched a second dollop of swill from Gully, and went to sit beside him. He gave her a polite glance and turned his face away, closed in his own thoughts.

  “Don’t be so choosy about your company, pook; you’re worm food yourself, once Purcell recognizes you.” His head snapped around at that. Their eyes met, his still uncomprehending, frightened. “We have to stop meeting this way,” she said softly, and mimed a kiss at him. “Sun Wolf is getting suspicious.”

  He gulped, stammered, then quickly returned his concentration to his bowl. “I saw him with them,” he said softly.

  “He’s under a spell of some kind, a geas, Purcell called it.”

  Moggin nodded. “Yes, that would stand to reason if they needed him to fight or work magic.” He coughed again; she saw the muscles of his sides and back brace in a vain attempt to stifle it. In the gray shadows of the mess hall, he looked awful.

  She sipped her tea. It was dreadful. “There a way of breaking it?”

  “A bypass morphological rune tree is supposed to work,” the philosopher said thoughtfully, “but it would take another wizard to set one up.” He paused, cradling the dirty wooden bowl of porridge between grimy, blistered hands, contemplating middle distance with scholarly absorption from behind a graying curtain of filth-streaked hair, and Starhawk marveled at the wonders of the pedagogical mind. “Now, the Sishak Ritual is supposed to offer protection, but again, we’d need a wizard to draw the Signs and construct an aetheric shelter before Sun Wolf could utilize them. We seem to be alternating between having one mage too many or one too few...”

  “Never mind that now,” the Hawk said. “Where are you working? On the barracks?”

  Moggin nodded, returning to scooping the tacky globs of porridge from bowl to mouth with fingers that shook. He paused, coughing again. He’d be little help, the Hawk reflected methodically, in terms of slugging guards, stealing books, or pilfering horses or weapons; she’d be lucky if she didn’t have to lug him physically out of the camp. But at least he could be counted on to do what he was told.

  “Listen. Get away from the work party as soon as you can, into any of the rooms near the burned section of the barracks. All of them vent into the old hypocaust. It’s flooded and pretty nasty, but you can crawl along it as far as the ruined furnace at the far end near the stables. Wait for me there. With this geas thing, how much of his own volition does the Wolf have? Is Purce
ll in his mind, seeing what he sees, or does he just control it like a puppet?”

  “A bit of both,” Moggin said softly, with a wary glance at a nearby guard, who was busy flirting with Big Nin. “As I understand it, theoretically the geas is an aether-fiber extension of Purcell’s own being, wrapped around Sun Wolf’s consciousness and nervous system. It’s partially astral-submaterialized but at least partly physical; it depends on conscious commands, not subconscious volition. Drosis’ books contained instructions for the geas master linking with the slave’s perceptions in a mediumistic trance, so it doesn’t sound as if a sensory link is automatic.”

  “On your feet!” yelled an overseer. “Come on, Wimpy, that puke you’re eating ain’t good enough to linger over!”

  Moggin rose at once, putting aside his unfinished bowl. Talking instead of eating had cost him a good half of what was probably the only food he’d receive that day. The overseer cuffed him, sending him stumbling after the other slaves through the door. Starhawk sat with her head bowed, not daring to look after him for fear of drawing the guard’s attention to herself. She’d had years of watching how men treat women in the elation of victory, and the fear she felt now was a new thing to her. In her current guise, she couldn’t very well kill a would-be suitor or even—dressed as she was, as any man’s property—imply that she would. She had killed literally hundreds of men, usually for business reasons, but had never learned to deal with them in a one-sided amatory situation. Her heart beat faster when she heard a man’s footsteps behind her. Trying to pretend she was unaware of them, she rose quickly to go.

  “Not so fast, Angelcakes,” Gully’s voice said behind her. She froze at the touch of his bandaged hand on the cloak she held so close around her. “You forgot your laundry.”