The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  “How’d you guess it was him?”

  “I found the Eyes. They were written on the front money he paid Ari—and more on the final payment, the stingy bastard. As treasurer he was the only one, beside Renaeka Strata, who had access to the money for long enough to mark it—and Renaeka had no reason to get rid of us and no need to use a curse if she did. From the money, the hex spread all over camp like a case of the clap.”

  “Proving that Sister Kentannis was right when she told me that money is a curse.” The Hawk grinned. “Bastard must have been a wizard all the way along.”

  “Looking back, I’m astounded I never guessed.” Moggin edged nearer to them, holding out grimy hands to the feeble warmth of the fire. “I did occasionally suspect Drosis might have had another student he never told me about, from fear of Altiokis. I remember his saying once how he felt obliged—compelled, almost—to pass his skills on to another mageborn so they would not die with him...” He broke off, fighting hard not to cough, his face turning an unhealthy gray with the strain. The spasm, when it came, was bad, leaving him retching and weak.

  After a long minute he continued, “And thinking about it, the House of Cronesme, which was quite minor fifteen years ago, has had some fairly consistent strokes of luck—like a rival’s ship springing a plank and letting Purcell’s cargo reach the markets first, which is really the sort of thing that can happen to anyone—or that time the entire season’s dye lots of the Greambii turned sour in the vats and nearly ruined them. Purcell’s brother always had the reputation as the ruthless one. Until the brother’s death, Purcell himself was just the head clerk at the Vorsal branch.”

  “Where he met Drosis,” Sun Wolf said thoughtfully. “And I’ve got a feeling what happened to his brother.” A merchant of sedentary habit, as old as Purcell’s older brother would have to have been, would never have the reflexes to save himself. “Wonder if he was beginning to suspect? After Purcell returned to Kwest Mralwe, he could have kept up the connection easy enough. Since they burn witches in Kwest Mralwe, he wouldn’t have dared take Drosis’ books, not if his trade rivals were keeping spies in his house. But my guess is he made coded copies over the years, long before Drosis bought it. I would have, anyway.”

  He fell silent then, staring into the grimy seed of the fire and listening to the screaming of the wind in the rocks. He felt queerly lightheaded, as if he had a fever. Holding the makeshift protection which the Signs of Sishak afforded drained and pulled at what power he had, and he sensed they’d give him no protection against a determined attempt to reassert the geas’ strength. Maybe they would, if he knew the entire Rite, or how the Signs worked... He didn’t know. The geas was still inside him, curled like leeches around the fabric of his mind, the deadly net of runes dark now but still waiting, still binding him to Purcell.

  “Given what things would be like in the Middle Kingdoms, if our pal the King could hire tame hookums,” Starhawk remarked, adding another chunk of elm wood to the fire, “I can see why they’d have a down on the mageborn. It makes sense even that they burned Renaeka’s mother. I don’t blame Purcell for hiding behind that rabbit facade all these years.”

  “I expect Drosis kept an eye on him, too,” Moggin said softly. “Purcell went very carefully while Drosis lived—partly from fear of Altiokis, who certainly killed Drosis’ other student, but partly from fear of Drosis himself. Drosis couldn’t have been his teacher without guessing at least somewhat the kind of man he would turn into, if he weren’t watched. The real power of the Cronesmae has only showed itself in the five years since Drosis’ death. At the time, I didn’t connect the two events, but looking back, I wonder that I was so blind.”

  “What a hell of a thing,” Sun Wolf said softly. “To have the power and the learning that could only be passed on to the mageborn, only understood by one who had the power... and to have that one be a greedy whore. Wonder where he got the djerkas?” His curling eyebrows pulled down into a frown as a disjointed image floated back to him from the patchy dark of his mind, an image of Starhawk with a pole in her hand, slamming it into a nightmare tangle of metal claws. There were bruises on her face, but in their fighting days she’d always had those. She did not appear to have been hurt in the taking of the camp, and he knew better than to ask how she had fared with a third party present. “Did it come after us?” he asked uncertainly. “You blindfolded me...”

  She nodded. “We pulverized the crystal that motivated it,” she said. “The body was too heavy to haul, and we had to get out of that cellar fast, since Zane knows all the good hiding places as well as we do. But we unhitched all its leg cables, threw them in the streams, and flattened out all those little joints with rocks. Even if Purcell has a spare crystal, it’ll take awhile to fix.”

  Sun Wolf sighed and ran big, clumsy hands through his stringy hair. Somewhere inside him, the geas shifted, pulled. He put forth his strength, almost afraid to try for fear of the pain, and it darkened away once again. But he knew it was still there.

  “You know how many boys got out with Ari?”

  She shook her head. “I know Purcell will be hunting the moors for ’em, though. Even if there aren’t enough loose to make real trouble, they’ll need all the slaves they can get to start the mines running. But I warn you, Chief—they know it was you who betrayed them.”

  “I know.” The shame of it stabbed him again, searing and soul-deep, and for an instant he wanted to kill himself, to cauterize it out of his memory as he’d once burned the burrowing fire of a gaum out of his eye...

  And the next instant, as the shame and helpless anger broke his concentration, the cold crystal grip of the geas clutched at his mind, dragging it toward easy darkness. With a gasp, he fought free of it, but the pain shocked him, zipping like a burning trail of blasting powder along his nerves...

  “Chief?” He opened his eye to see Starhawk and Moggin close beside him, concern in their faces. He shook his head, trying to force aside the memory of the pain, the dark hurt of the shame that made him vulnerable again.

  “I’m all right,” he whispered, aware that his lips, his fingers, and feet were icy cold with shock. “It’s just... It can’t wait. Not for them—not for me. We’ve got to retake the camp—we’ve got to kill Purcell. Now, soon. Or it’s death for all of us.”

  “And you expect us to believe this?” Arms folded under the ragged cloak of his black bearskin, Ari regarded Sun Wolf with bitter fury in his hazel eyes.

  Sun Wolf, who would have infinitely preferred being sold naked on the eunuch’s block of the Genshan slave market to facing his friends again, said quietly, “Not really.”

  If Starhawk hadn’t been with him, standing unobtrusively in the background with Moggin at her side, he doubted he’d have had the courage to enter the dripping dark of the mine shaft at all. He also doubted that any of the men gathered around the tiny fires in the old pit-head chamber would have listened to him, had not the Hawk had her usual quiet air of being ready to rip off the head of the first man who spoke and spit down his neck.

  Penpusher said, “C-can Purcell see through your eyes? See where we are, how few of us there are?”

  “No,” said the Wolf. Of that, at least, he was sure.

  Ari asked, “Can you prove that?”

  “No.” The pain of seeing what was in their eyes and on their faces was like a spear blade in his guts. But as a warrior, he’d gone on fighting with weapons in him and only let himself hurt afterward.

  Dogbreath spoke up. “Does he know you’ve pulled free of him?”

  “If he’s pulled free of him,” growled the Goddess under her breath, patting her palm with a naked sword.

  “Yeah,” the Wolf said, ignoring her. “He’ll try to bring me under his will again when we meet. He may succeed. If that happens while we’re fighting for the camp I want the nearest person to kill me. That includes you, Hawk.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” someone else muttered, unseen in the inky shadows. The pit-head chamber was large, h
ewn from the hill and several inches deep in a revolting stew of dirt, foxes’ mess, old leaves, and seeped water that ran down the walls from above. They’d had to pile rocks to build a heather fire a man could have covered with his cupped hands. The flickering blaze splashed random patches of gilding on the haggard faces of the troopers grouped around them, the brass buckles of Penpusher’s sheepskin jacket, and the jeweled rings snagged in the tangled jungle of Dogbreath’s hair; it outlined in shadow the Goddess’ scars and gleamed with a silvery shine in Curly Bear’s eyes. All together there were, the Wolf guessed, ninety warriors who had fled with Ari and taken his side—eighty-three men and seven women, not counting himself and the Hawk.

  “Considering he knows you can break away from him,” Ari said, his voice calm despite the gall in his eyes, “he’ll probably kill you himself.”

  The Wolf said steadily, “I know he will. But I’d rather have it from friends.”

  “Join the club, pook,” muttered someone. “We already got it from a friend.”

  Ari moved his head a little, eyes glinting dangerously under the curtain of his tangled black hair, and the man silenced. Bitter wind moaned across the shaft entrance nearby, calling up a deeper groan from the black depths, where the seam of alum-bearing rock plunged downward into the hill. There was no other sound. “Anyone who wants to is welcome to leave,” Ari said quietly into that hush. “If you think you can keep away from Purcell and Zane and if you’ve got someplace else to go.”

  He scanned them, meeting now one man’s eyes, now another’s, challenging them to speak. “Let me point out to you that Purcell isn’t just out to catch all the slaves he can and that he knows as well as we do that the best way to keep a mine slave from running is to hack off one foot. He’s not gonna let anyone out of the wastelands who’ll peach to the King-Council about him being a hoodoo.” After a moment he turned back to Sun Wolf, his eyes, behind the hard wariness and the desperation of twenty-four hours of sleepless fatigue, saying plainly, Hurt me again and I’ll kill you.

  Around them, the men gathered in, the raw smells of drying blood, filth, sweat, and dirty hair rank in the unventilated room, smells Sun Wolf knew from a childhood in the camps of war. Like a dog in his pack, he felt warmed by them, aware of the support once more of those iron bonds that looked so casual to those who had never felt them—bonds that didn’t ask questions and didn’t care and didn’t think what a man thought or felt, only that he was one of the pack and was there when needed.

  Home, he thought, and for an instant understood the raw physicality of the bond that achieved through the wordless contact of violence what dancers achieve through dance, what lovers—sometimes—achieve through sex. But at the same time, he saw the burning walls, the carrion crows eating dead women in the streets, Moggin’s daughter with her throat slit to the neckbone only because she lived in the wrong place at the wrong time, and disgust and horror sickened him, both at it and at himself for never having seen it before.

  The realization passed in an instant, as his concentration went back to what Ari was saying, Ari, who was commander now. But having seen what the bond had sprung from, he finally understood in his heart that this was his home no more.

  “The damn thing is that they know the territory as well as we do, Chief,” Ari went on. “Zane’s got nearly two hundred of the original troop on his side, plus Louth’s boys, and every postern, well shaft and low place in the walls are gonna be guarded. We thought about getting help from the village; but, if what you say is true, the men there’ll be locked up under guard.”

  “C-candy,” grunted Penpusher. “Two people c-could bust ’em out of the town hall jail, easy.”

  Ari nodded. “Yeah, standard stuff. Routine Three—riot, diversion, Zane sends out a troop, we ambush them at Dingle Creek because they’ll be ready for it at Crow Rocks, steal their horses and arms, and so on. But there’s still ninety of us riding back into a camp of damn near five hundred of them, plus a goddam hoodoo. I don’t see how we can do it.”

  “The same way they did us,” said Sun Wolf quietly. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you that curses fly home to roost? I know where those Eyes are now, and I know what they look like. I’m gonna take and shove that hex down their goddam throats.”

  Quietly, Dogbreath asked, “And the wizard?”

  The wizard. Purcell. Sun Wolf had a momentary vision of those colorless eyes, devoid even of cruelty, and of the knife outstretched in his hand. Cold, clinging, like nooses of glowing wire, the geas whispered of its presence as the growing strain of holding it from him twitched at his every thought, like the pain of the wound in his arm. He knew the time was short, that he dared not even sleep now until it was done. “I’ll have to meet him.” His voice sounded smaller than he intended.

  He glanced across at Moggin, standing next to Starhawk, as if for protection, in the thick shadows near the door. “I’ll need your help, Moggy.”

  “I thought you said he was a fake,” protested the Goddess, and Moggin shut his eyes with a kind of weary, ironic patience at his interpretation of his non-powers.

  Ari’s eyes flicked from the white-faced and bedraggled philosopher to the Wolf, worried—not as a commander gauging a potentially weak link, which was what, the Wolf thought tiredly, should have been his concern, but as a son anxious for the overstretched strength of the man he most cared for. The anger between them, the quarrels, even the betrayal, Sun Wolf realized, were largely peripheral to that care. In spite of the fatigue, in spite of the pain of his arm and the cold dread of what he knew was yet to come, he felt warmed. “Can you do that?”

  He shook his head. “I guess we’ll all find that out.”

  Chapter 16

  “YOU KNOW THE one we need.” Moist echoes carried the Wolf’s words away into the claustrophobic darkness. Moggin paused in the act of fixing the torch into an old socket cut in the rock of the mine’s walls, his bowed shoulders stiffening.

  Then Moggin sighed, and all the tension seemed to go out of him, taking with it what little strength he had left. He whispered ironically, “Of course.” Then he leaned his forehead against the slimy rock face, and Sun Wolf saw the whole gaunt body shiver. “What else would we use?”

  At the cracked, sobbing note in Moggin’s voice the Wolf crossed the distance between them, a matter of a stride or two between the rock face and the edge of the slimy water which drowned the remainder of the mine tunnel as it turned down, seeking still further darkness. The Keep-Awakes Sun Wolf had gotten from Ari—drugs on which most of the men had been living for the last twenty-four hours—filled him with a tinsely restlessness under the growing pain of the geas, but didn’t impair the bone-bred instincts of a commander who hears one of his men breaking under prolonged fatigue and exhaustion. He caught Moggin’s shoulders in his big hands as the other man began to laugh hysterically.

  Had it been one of the troop, the Wolf would have shaken him, struck him, and cursed back the wave of broken sobs following hard upon that uncontrolled laughter. They hadn’t time for it—that much Sun Wolf knew. He could feel the geas growing in him, and knew it would get worse when Purcell woke up again and started working it consciously. It was getting harder and harder to cling to the half-understood protection of the Sishak Rites. When the Keep-Awakes wore off he would, he knew, sleep like the dead, and the geas would devour him in his sleep. There wasn’t time for any of this.

  But he only held Moggin tight against him, while the other man wept.

  Because, as they both knew, the ritual he would have to work was the one he had seen Moggin working the last night Moggin had spent with his family before their murders, the spell that had convinced him, and everyone else, that Moggin was indeed the mage who had raised the curse—the spell of the summoning of power from the bones of the earth.

  Gently, gradually he sank down to his knees, bringing Moggin down with him, to sit with their backs to the wet surface of the alum-bearing rock. All the while, Moggin sobbed as the tight controlled hardness of everyt
hing he had endured broke to pieces at once: the flight from the camp before the djerkas; Zane’s sadism; and the rape and murder of his wife and daughters before his eyes. Sun Wolf remembered their voices drifting down the kitchen stairs while he himself stood in the dark of the cellar, frantic with fear for Starhawk’s life and for his own enslavement. He knew that was in Moggin’s mind now—the two fair-haired girls and the woman whose smile had still been sweetly serene after five months of siege, all in their white nightdresses in the dark kitchen while Moggin did some fast explaining about why everyone suddenly seemed to think he was a wizard.

  Without quite knowing how, the Wolf knew it had been the last time he’d spoken with them.

  He’d seen men come to pieces like this under the stress of combat or prolonged physical hardship, and Moggin didn’t have either the physical or emotional toughness of the troops. Feeling the geas stir within him, flexing the terrifying strength of those glittering tendrils, he wondered if he were getting soft, letting the most vital link of his plan break down like this and delaying things who knew how long when his own endurance could be measured in hours.

  But having so nearly lost Starhawk, he wasn’t about to say to another man, Suck it in, soldier. If his ancestors didn’t like it, they could go look for another descendant.

  Which they might have to do in any case.

  At length, Moggin’s weeping subsided, and the philosopher turned away from him, wiping his bruised face with shaking fingers that merely served to smear the tear-tracked filth into mud. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and coughed, deep and agonized. “It’s just that...”