The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  On the far side of the room Purcell stood beneath the arches of the gallery, a trim, dark shape which no light seemed to touch. His magic filled the room like the bass voice of unspoken thunder, vibrating in Sun Wolf’s bones. The dark hand of shadow reached out toward him, trailing darkness from skeletal fingers. The hated voice spoke, soft and spiteful and smug, from the gloom.

  “Don’t come any farther, Sun Wolf.”

  The rage that surged in him at the cold timbre of those words was almost nauseating. Shame, fury, and humiliation blazed into lightning in his hands, and he flung that lightning at the dark form. But the shadow hand gestured, repeating the wave of the soft white fingers emerging from Purcell’s furred sleeve. With a shifting crackle the power dispersed, cold little lightnings running away into the walls.

  Then Purcell gestured again and pain locked around Sun Wolf’s head, like the spiked bands torturers used to rip off the tops of their victims’ skulls. Though he did not look down he was aware of the silver runes all over his flesh, clinging stickily to his bones and nerves and mind, to his life and the very core of his being.

  I’ve fought on with worse than this in battle, he told himself, through blinding agony, though he knew it was a lie. I can do it now... He forced himself a step forward; it was like pulling his own bones from his flesh. Purcell flinched back, for a moment seeming as if he would run. Then he stepped forward once more. The smoky light picked out wisps of gray hair under his velvet cap, and tire white-silver frostiness of his eyes. “I see you’ve been fool enough to tamper with earth magic,” he said coolly. “Good. That will make it easier for me. I suppose you looked on it as just another convenient drug. You thugs really are all alike. Get down on your knees—I won’t have you standing.”

  Sun Wolf’s knees started to bend in an almost reflexive obedience. He stopped himself, panting.

  “Down, I said! DOWN!”

  A shudder passed through him, but he remained on his feet. In the cold bar of light, he saw Purcell’s nostrils dilate with real anger and that prim upper lip tighten.

  “You defiant animal. I see I was right to abandon the thought of making you either slave or ally, with such an intransigent attitude. What a waste of power.”

  “I wonder—you didn’t—seek Altiokis—as an ally,” Sun Wolf panted, the sweat of exertion pouring down his face with the effort not to kneel. His tongue felt numb with the long silence of his madness. Panic fought at the edges of his mind, the sense that the world would crumble, that he would die, if he didn’t kneel—and what was kneeling, after all? “You’re two of a kind.”

  “We are nothing of the sort!” Purcell retorted, deeply affronted, and some of the agony eased as his attention flickered to his offended pride. “The man was a drunkard and a sensualist, like yourself! He gathered power only to waste it on his perverted pleasures. He was a gangster, not a businessman.”

  “What the hell do you think businessmen are but gangsters with the bowels cut out of them?” He’d hoped making Purcell angry would have freed him, but with every ounce of strength he could summon, he could neither take another step, nor touch the black whirlwind of pain and insanity that was fading slowly back along the scorched trails of his nerves and bones. As it did, the geas tightened, slowly strangling—he was aware he was trembling with exhaustion.

  Nevertheless anger washed over him, anger at his cold little man in his neat gray robes and hands that had never wielded more than ledger and quill. “You and your damn King-Council would wipe out Vorsal rather than risk them cutting out your trade; and you’d sooner wipe out my friends than negotiate with them...”

  “Negotiate?” Purcell spoke the word as if it were a perversion beneath his dignity. “With a pack of barbarians who would trade their influence to the first merchant who offered them dancing girls? If I’m to hold control of the King-Council, I can’t be wondering from month to month about alliances with people who haven’t the faintest idea what business is about. No—it really was the only way. You must see that. Now... draw your sword.”

  “Eat rats.” He was fighting for breath, the pain unbearable. He wondered if, when the last earth magic went, he’d die. Remembering Purcell’s dominance of him, the rape of his mind and will, he hoped he would.

  Smoke had thickened around them even as they spoke, a fog of choking blackness dimming the light. With a crashing roar something fell behind him, and the heat of fire beat against his back. Trapped, pinned where he stood against the glaring light of the blaze, he could move neither forward nor back. The Armory was burning—or was it only the searing heat of the earth magic consuming him? His scraped voice managed to gasp out the words, “You want to kill me, you come over here and do it with your own lily-white hand!”

  “Don’t be foolish.” The hated voice was calm as if addressing a child.

  A shower of sparks whirled through the doorway behind him. One of them lighted on the back of his hand; his other hand jerked to strike it out, but could not move. As the hot needle of pain drilled into his skin and the thin smoke of his searing flesh stung his nose he heard Purcell say, “I know what will happen when the earth magic ebbs—what it will take with it when it goes. It’s fading already, is it not? The mere fact that you can speak tells me it is. So I have only to wait...”

  Dark madness filled him, swamping the insignificant agony of his hand. With a cry, he tried to lunge for the old man, to kill him as an animal kills; the geas seemed to explode in his skull, blinding him, smothering him, holding him fast.

  Around him the sparks had kindled little lines of fire across the floor, crawling in blazing threads toward the walls. In another few minutes the place would be in flames. The dark magic surged and thrashed in him, but could not overcome the deadlock of the cold silvery will bound so fast around his mind. He realized in panic Purcell would hold him here until the fire reached him, hold him in it, unable to move...

  “CHIEF!”

  The geas slacked infinitesimally as Purcell looked past him into the smoke-filled anteroom. Sun Wolf heard, or felt beneath the greedy crackle of the flames, the light spring of Starhawk’s boots. He tried to scream a warning, and the geas locked on his throat like a strangler’s hand. A moment later, Starhawk was beside him, the wildfire light splashing red over the blade of her lifted throwing ax. Then she gave a cry, doubling over in agony, her knees buckling as she clutched at the X-shaped scar on her head. The ax slipped from her nerveless fingers; she caught at the wall, fighting to stay on her feet.

  Purcell smiled.

  And Sun Wolf thought, as if the woman sinking sobbing down beside him were as complete a stranger as those he had spent most of his life being paid to kill, It isn’t just business to him. He does enjoy it.

  And the rage of his anger turned cold, collapsing inward, a black star swallowing light.

  Deliberately, coldly, he conjured the last of the earth magic into himself, for he could not cast it out past the bonds of the geas. But with all the strength of it, with all the strength he possessed, he gathered the geas around him, drawing it into his mind, his soul, his life; holding fast to the tendrils that bound him to Purcell’s will—and Purcell to him.

  “Starhawk,” he said quietly, and she looked up at him with eyes streaming with smoke and pain. “Take the ax. Kill me with it.”

  Purcell had felt the change in the geas, the slacking of his resistance; he stumbled forward as if some physical pressure had been released. “What?” he gasped, and Sun Wolf smiled, feeling the strength of the geas now from the other side. He held it closer to him, using all the earth magic to bind those silver ropes to his life.

  “You want me to die, Purcell, you’re coming with me. Now. Do it, Hawk.”

  Whether she understood what he was doing or not he didn’t know, but she had never disobeyed his command. Her hand shaking, she picked up the weapon again, and swaying, forced herself to her feet.

  “What are you doing?” screamed Purcell. “I forbid this! I command you to... to...”


  “Release you?” said Sun Wolf softly. Perhaps he did not say it—he couldn’t tell. Perhaps the words sounded only in his mind. But he knew the master wizard heard. “No. You release me—or you come with me. Do it, Hawk.” He felt the geas bite, rip, twist like a terrified bullock on a rope. But its very nature twisted it around his mind and soul, and he held it fast.

  Beside him the Hawk drew herself up, her eyes dilated, delirious with the pain gouging at her skull. “You’re insane!” Purcell was yelling. “Let me go...”

  Sun Wolf made no reply, watching the Hawk, willing her to find the strength against the pain in her own head. He had taught her that strength, and taught her obedience to the Cold Hells and beyond. Shadowed black against the flames in the doorway behind her, the Cold Hells of pain and madness were in her eyes. The earth magic was evaporating from his flesh; he could feel his strength going, and tightened his grip still further on Purcell’s geas, on the silver mind entangling his, to drag it down with him into death.

  Wearing her cold, soulless battle face, Starhawk raised the ax. Purcell screamed, “Let me go...”

  You let me go, dammit, he thought, but all he could manage to cry was “Do it, Hawk! NOW! That’s an order!”

  She screamed her battle yell and swung with all her strength at his skull.

  The snapping of the geas from his mind was like a rope breaking, disorienting in its suddenness; he barely twisted aside in time. But the Hawk’s reflexes, even in pain and madness, were as fast as his own. Her momentum was broken, even as he snatched the ax from her hand. He was turning as he did so, turning and throwing, and even with one eye—if he aimed with his eye, and not by instinct and magic and hate—his aim was true.

  The ax took Purcell right where it should, at the base of his spine. He seemed to break at the waist and fold backward, collapsing in the archway where he had first stood; at the same moment there was another crashing, and a beam from an upper floor ploughed down from above, setting the rafters overhead on fire. Sparks rained down, igniting the wooden floor. Sun Wolf caught the Hawk by one arm as she staggered, and together the two of them ran through the falling sparks and choking blur of smoke, through the furnace of the two chambers behind them, to the white rectangle of the outer door.

  He knew the stairway outside was gone and was long past caring. He and the Hawk flung themselves through the door, and for endless minutes, it seemed to him, they floated outward and down... to land in a tangle of mud, lumber, and the bodies of the slain.

  The earth magic left him as he jumped. He hit the waste of struts and boards limp and muscleless as the last of that black torment vanished like vapor, taking even its memory with it. His own magic, the power that had slept in his bones since his childhood, the power to weave the winds and to call back the living from the shadow-lands of death, vanished, too. He felt nothing inside him but a vast white hollow, an emptiness that filled the world. Later it would hurt. He knew that even then.

  For a long time, he lay on his back, wondering if he would die, and looking up at the smoke pouring up out of the burning Armory into the gray belly of the sky.

  Then Starhawk’s voice asked, “You okay, Chief?” Her hand reached down to help him to his feet; she had to put her shoulder under his arm to help him cross the square to where Ari and his men waited for them beside the gate.

  Zane had never made his appearance to rally his men or to give any kind of direction to the fighting in which they so greatly outnumbered their attackers. Without Purcell, Louth, or any other leader, they had given up quickly. Once Ari and his forces had broken through the postern gate, there had been relatively few casualties. A number of these, the Wolf was told later, had been in fights between members of Zane’s own forces, over booze or whetstones or fancied thefts, or all the meaningless trivia over which they’d fought all summer—fights which had broken out immediately after the departure of the relief force for Wrynde.

  Zane himself they found in his bed. Sun Wolf looked up from the eyeless and sexually mutilated corpse sprawled among the gory welter of the sheets in time to see Ari turn away, gray-lipped and sick. “I knew Zane was a bastard,” the young commander said softly. “But Holy Three, he didn’t deserve a death like that from any man.”

  Others had crowded into the room to see—Hog, still in Louth’s armor with the faithful Helmpiddle waddling behind; Penpusher, with a bandage torn from some corpse’s clothing wrapped around his arm, and Dogbreath, limping, holding onto a halberd to stay on his feet and grinning like a golliwog through a mask of dirt and blood. Behind them in the doorway Sun Wolf saw Opium, clothed in a very plain blue dress that was too big for her, obviously borrowed from someone else, the velvet profusion of her hair not quite concealing the livid brown bruises on her face.

  “What makes you think it was...” began Starhawk; but her eyes followed his; after regarding Opium for a thoughtful moment, she raised her eyebrows, shoved her hands behind the buckle of her sword belt, and held her peace.

  Chapter 18

  “THAT’LL BE FIVE COPPERS.”

  “Goddam highway robbery, that’s what it is,” Sun Wolf growled to himself, but watched Opium’s backside appreciatively as she reached down the credit book from the shelf behind the bar and marked his page. “Worth it,” he added, as she glanced back at him with teasing eyes through the tendrils of her hair, “for a drink of real beer.”

  “Sure be nice,” muttered Dogbreath, raising Penpusher four wood chips at the poker table nearby, “if we could pay for it with real money.”

  Sun Wolf said nothing. He knew the remark had been directed at him, though not with any particular malice.

  Opium folded shut her credit book. “The credit you’ve been spreading all over camp is more money than you’ve seen in your life, Puppylove, so make the most of it.” She pulled the lever on the keg, loosing a stream of nut-brown silk into the pewter tankard Sun Wolf maintained on the premises, and set the beer on the plank bar before him. For a moment their eyes met. She was still heart-stoppingly beautiful, but he was growing used to that. The fact that she was now living with Bron helped, satisfying some male territorial instinct in him that took offense at the thought of an unclaimed female. Though he might toy with the notion of dragging her down and ravishing her under the bar whenever he walked into the place, he no longer had to fight to keep from doing so. At least not much.

  It might have been that she was more content with her life now, happy with Bron and making money—or at least what would be money when currency became once more available in the camp—hand over fist. Since Bron and Opium actually had wares to sell, a good portion of the fund of credit in the camp was slowly making its way into their ledger books, and the always-active camp gossip had it that Opium was one of the chief investors in the consortium that would run the alumstone diggings. Some of the men added that she’d turned bitchy since she’d gotten rich—meaning that she no longer danced in the tavern, and the dark flightiness, the vulnerability that had drawn the Wolf’s protective instincts, was gone, replaced by a calm and confident peace. But if Sun Wolf missed the romance of that hunted helplessness, he at least did not grudge her what she’d gained instead.

  She still moved with a dancer’s lightness as she brought him his beer, pausing for only a moment before the little mirror back of the bar to adjust the silk flower in her hair. “And you?” she asked softly. “Is it going better, Wolf?”

  He was silent, staring down at the marble-white from in the tankard cupped between his scarred hands. Was it ‘going better’?

  He made himself nod. “Fine,” he said. “All right.”

  Her dark brow puckered with a friend’s concern. “Do you think you’ll ever be able to...”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Her breath drew in to apologize, or query, or express her very genuine worry for him, and he concentrated on keeping his hands on the tankard and not slapping her and telling her to shut the hell up. But she let her breath out unused. After an awkward pause, he drained
his beer and gave her a smile he hoped didn’t look manufactured. “Thank you,” he said, and left.

  His magic had not returned.

  Winter had locked down on the camp. As he crossed the square, the frozen mud crunched treacherously beneath his boots, blotched with trampled and dirty snow. Wind moaned around the fortress’ rubble walls, low now, but rising in the nights to dismal shrieking in the high rafters of Sun Wolf’s house, in the lofts of Bron’s tavern and the makeshift ceilings of the hospital and stables. In the hospital it scarcely mattered. Those who had not died of the plague, no matter how ill they were, had begun recovery almost from the moment Purcell had perished in the burning Armory.

  Xanchus, Mayor of Wrynde, had sent two midwives to help with the nursing until Butcher recovered. Neither was mageborn or had the healing power in her hands, but both understood granny magic, and Sun Wolf had humbly boiled water and sorted herbs for them in order to learn whatever they could teach. Moggin had volunteered all the lore he’d accumulated about medicine, but the older of the two grannies confided to the Wolf one day while grinding elfdock that in the main, the Wolf’s assistance was by far the most useful. The few men who had laughed at his helping the old ladies had quickly regretted being heard. Later, when Sun Wolf had suggested that they go a few training bouts with him with wooden swords after one of Ari’s classes, they had regretted being born. When the weather cleared a little between storms, the Wolf still rode the ten miles into Wrynde to improve his herb lore. He understood now that this and the healing he was studying with Butcher might be the closest he would ever come to magic again.

  By day, he understood that he was lucky to have survived the earth magic at all.

  Waking in the night was different.

  In dreams he returned, again and again, to his first, ancient vision of magic; to the little wooden naos behind the village long-house where the Ancestors dwelled. In the dreams he was a man, not the boy he had been, but the place had not changed. In the shadowy forest of spirit poles on the other side of the stinking blood trench he could still see the faint gleam of the skulls racked along the rear wall and pick out the names of ancestors crudely carved on each stained trunk. The tokens of their mortal lives—usually a knife or helmet, but sometimes only a few scraps of hair, a bit of braided leather, or a tuft of woven straw—seemed to move restlessly with the leap of the fire on the stone altar, where it blazed as it did on the Feasts of the Dead. It was higher, hotter, fiercer than he’d ever seen it in life, blazing wildly up toward the rafters as if old Many Voices had dumped powdered birch bark into it from his trailing sleeves.