Hambly, Barbara - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark hand of magic.txt

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  "No?" the Wolf said, shifting his arms against the ropes that twisted them so painfully around the shafts of the guards' spears. When they'd dragged him back to the study he'd seen at once that the rugs had been hastily pulled down to cover the half-made patterns of power on the floor, the implements and the black book bundled away, the cabinet locked. That, if nothing else, had told him what he needed to know. "Then haul up the rugs."

  The guards looked at each other, paranoia in their hollow eyes. One of them stepped to obey, and Moggin interposed himself quickly in front of the man. "This is ridiculous," he stated in his quiet voice. At first glance a mildly retiring man, still he had a kind of quiet authority to him that stopped the guard in his tracks. "I'll answer any accusation this man cares to make when I can be sure he isn't simply trying to keep you all busy while his confederates escape."

  "He's right," the Duke said, as the guards hesitated. "Attis, Rangin-take four men and search the neighborhood. I take it you have no objection to our using your wine cellar as a jail until we return from doing a circuit of the walls?"

  "Not at all," Moggin said, inclining his head deeply so that the young Duke would not see the pleased gleam in his eye.

  Sun Wolf saw it, however. With a bellowed oath he wrenched at the ropes that bound him, lunged toward the door again, dragging three of the half-starved guards, like a bear dragging a hunter's dogs. Anything was better than that, he thought; to be bound in darkness, waiting for those silver ruins to glimmer into being again around him; to hear that triumphant laughter ...

  He was almost to the door when the rest of the guards brought him down. He had a foggy glimpse of the young Duke of Vorsal, standing with arms folded across the gilded cuirass that was now far too large for him, dark eyes fixed speculatively on Moggin's carefully expressionless face. Then lights exploded in his skull, followed by roaring darkness.

  He wasn't out for long. The damp cold of the wine cellar brought him to while the guards were still tying his wrists to the dusty racks that had once contained bottles of the household vintage. They were muttering to themselves as they ascended the stairs; he heard the name Drosis, and an uneasy whisper of witchery. Then the slits of light around the locked cellar door faded, and he was in darkness again.

  He wouldn't have long, he knew. It was good odds Moggin had never expected to be holding prisoners in his cellar and hadn't laid magic guards upon the place. He could sense no spells at work in the black air around him. Though his head ached-his face was swelling too, where that damn hoe had connected-the spells to loosen the knots and stretch the fibers of the ropes came easily to him this time. At least there's no ants, he thought, giving his mind over to them, feeling the slow tingle of power shivering against his skin. And you're not groggy with poison and trying not to think about how badly you 're going to die. All he needed was time.

  But he saw the fulvid slits of light outlining the heavy door long before he was able to free his hands.

  Gutter-nosed festering goddam rope-spells, he thought viciously, the spells themselves flicking away as anger and frustration broke his concentration and he braced himself to meet the enemy wizard. I will not become his slave. I will not ... His breath came fast with dread.

  But the light dimmed around the door, as if the lamp that made it were carried a door or two past the small room in which he was bound. The clack of a lock, loud in the darkness as a headsman's ax, was not from the door before him, but from another. Then came a scraping and a furtive rustle; the lamp brightened again, then dimmed away as it was carried back from whence it had come.

  He's hiding the books, thought the Wolf, before the guards come back.

  So Moggin's fear was real. The Duke wouldn't protect him if he knew. Madness, yes, but then the Triple God was very strong in these parts, and there might be other factors as well, anything from local politics to some ancient grudge in operation.

  His ancestors really were listening tonight.

  There were two solid shelves of books, plus various implements, adding up to half a dozen trips' worth down the hall from the study, through who knew how many rooms and passages-he cursed the guards for stunning him to bring him here, forgetting it was he who'd tried to flee. By the pleased look in Moggin's eyes, the wizard very likely knew who he was, but this unexpected result of his accusation bought him time. How much time?

  He was distantly aware that Moggin's feet had passed the door three more times, before the ropes around his wrists slacked away. Counting, he found each trip took slightly less than four minutes.

  The lock on the door itself was candy. He counted Moggin's retreating footsteps up the stairs, then slipped out into the low-ceilinged passage which connected the cellar's various storage rooms and paused, listening, stretching his senses out through the pitch-black house.

  Muffled by the earth of the walls and floor, the girl Rianna's voice came soft to him from somewhere above: "Daddy, what is it? Who was that man? Why are you moving Drosis' books ... "

  Keep him talking, honey, the Wolf thought, and ducked through the half-open door into the next rock-cut, earth-smelling chamber. It held the family food stores, a few half-empty sacks of flour and corn looking pitifully small in the bottoms of the big, tin-lined wooden bins. One of the bins had been pulled aside to reveal a sort of safe set into the floor underneath. The flagstone that concealed it lay by the side of its square entry hole. Kneeling, Sun Wolf could see twenty or more books stacked neatly at the bottom, and with them, a small basket containing boxes, phials, chalk, and one or two pieces of equipment that he recognized as medical.

  Medical implements, Moggin had said. Drosis had been a healer.

  Straining for the sound of Moggin's returning footfalls, Sun Wolf reached down into the hole.

  Three books were all he could carry, shoved into his doublet against his body and belted tight-two books of medicine and what looked like a casebook of notes. Into the purse at his belt-cursing because he hadn't brought a larger one-he shoved a phial half-full of what he recognized as auligar powder, and the smallest, most delicately balanced bronze trephine he'd ever seen. Stretching out his mageborn senses, he could hear Moggin still making excuses, reasoning with both of his daughters now and his wife and, by the sound of it, two or three servants as well.

  He hadn't told them, then. They didn't know. The man must have been living a double life for years. Well, if the local feeling against hookum was such that at this point in the siege they'd kill a mage instead of ask his help, that made sense, Sun Wolf reflected as he glided soundlessly up the cellar steps. For years past, Altiokis had killed every wizard he could find. Or perhaps they merely knew Moggin well enough to see through that scholarly gentleness and the respectable and orthodox philosophical treatises.

  How many other wizards, he wondered, slipping through the kitchen door and across the dark garden, were doing that and had done that down the years? How many had made a living of dissimulation, gone to Church, and faked humility, deliberate chameleons as opposed to those, like himself, who had refused to admit at all what the mad intensity of those visions might mean.

  If there was one, there were probably others. If he could find one ...

  Another like Moggin? He shivered as he stepped through the narrow gate and into the alley once more. Who'll try to snare your soul in silver runes for some purpose of his own?

  He drew the shadows around him still more thickly, his boots making no sound on the cobbled streets that led to the city wall.

  It was past midnight when he reached the House of Stratus. The house, like the city around it, blazed with torches and lamps. Riding swiftly up the narrow lanes of the University Quarter, the Wolf hadn't been so naive as to suppose that the oil burning behind all those luminous golden squares of window parchment, the lantern-light streaming from taverns where gray-robed students argued metaphysics at the top of their voices, and the firefly cressets darting along in the hands of hundreds of blue-uniformed linkboys had anything to do with the assault on Vo
rsal at tomorrow's dawn. It was the shank of the evening; nobles of the ancient landed families had parties to attend, reclining masked behind the curtains of their sedan chairs as their slaves bore them up and down the slanted streets; the wives and sons and brothers of the great merchant houses were still abroad, surrounded by battalions of liveried bravos as they, too, moved from card parties to balls to rounds of delicious gossip about the nobles through whose front doors they were not permitted to pass. Costermongers were shouting their wares at half price to empty their barrows of herring or pies; whores in red and gold with their fantastic purple headdresses strolled the lanes, masked also or smiling behind elaborate feather fans, their own slaves in front of them sometimes, carrying their night lamps and cosmetics; young clerks with tinted lovelocks curling down over their shoulders promenaded with giggling shopgirls, out to see the sights.

  Guiding his horse through the press, the Wolf wasn't sure why he felt such anger at them. It might have sprung from his own fear that he'd return to find Starhawk already dead and what remained of his life echoing empty before him-a fear that had ridden beside him, with hoof-beats almost audible, all the way from Vorsal. It might have been his own frustrated despair as he'd come to realize that finding a master wizard who would freely teach him and not try to enslave or use him-or destroy him, perhaps-might not be as easy as he'd so innocently hoped; and all this riotous bourgeois joy around him irritated him by its contrast.

  But mostly, he thought, it was because, for these people, it wasn't war. The man who'd died of cold creeping out in the night to line up for half a cup of corn, whose neighbors had pushed his body into the gutter rather than lose their own places in line; the ten-year-old whore he'd passed, hawking her emaciated and shivering body outside a tavern for the price of enough dream-sugar to forget where she was and what would become of her; the old women patiently digging through the garbage in the streets in search of food; those were all nothing to these people. They made enough money to hire their soldiering done. They voted into city office the nobles who owned the land they lived on; the nobles obeyed the merchant houses who had supported them in their ancient style for the last two generations; the merchant houses needed corn lands, or a wool monopoly, or a deep-water harbor; and so there was war.

  Renaeka Strata was cagey enough not to let the war inconvenience her supporters.

  Except, of course, people like Starhawk, who'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Ari was waiting for him in the lambent blaze of the courtyard lights. He was in his battle armor already, leather plated with steel, the joints of his elbows and shoulders bristling with savage spikes whose edges glittered where the black paint that kept it from rusting had been chipped off in battle, and the ax that was his primary weapon strapped already to his back. His black hair hung to his shoulders, and the gold emblem of the Triple God, a child's medal, glinted in the pit of his throat with the rise and fall of his breath. In the delicate marble and fragile archways of the court, he looked alien and savage, and the grooms who came to take the Wolf's horse gave him wide berth as he came striding across, holding out his hands.

  "Don't tell me you beat him up in an alley!" he grinned, with forced lightness, nodding at the bruises and cuts that mottled Sun Wolf's face like an overripe fruit. Sun Wolf, pulling down the saddlebag that contained the three stolen books, the phials and powders and the trephine, didn't answer, and Ari's smile faded, his hazel eyes hard. "You skrag him?"

  "No."

  The Wolf had already begun to stride toward the colonnade that led around to Starhawk's rooms by the terrace; Ari's grip in his plated glove was like an iron band, forcing him to stop. Their eyes met.

  Quietly, Ari said, "The siege engines are already on the road to Vorsal; that's why I'm here. Zane's back at the camp getting the men into final formation. In three hours we're going to be under that wall, with that wizard on top of us." By his tone he already guessed what the Wolf was going to say.

  Their eyes held; it was a long time before the Wolf could speak. "I'm sorry."

  "They're gonna be killed, Chief. 'Sorry' doesn't cut it."

  Ari, thought the Wolf. Penpusher, Dogbreath, Zane, Firecat ... all his friends. This young man whose clear hazel eyes were so furious, so desperate, glaring into his. The dark hand reaching out of the storm's darkness, the wild laughter of triumph shaking the skies ... He remembered the eldritch horror of the patterns on that tiled study floor, the strength he'd felt on the night of the weather-witching as the spells closed around him.

  They'd be slaughtered.

  He drew a deep breath, everything in him hurting, as if he'd been caught in the twisting of a ship's cable that can sever a man in half.

  "They're volunteers. She isn't."

  "Horseshit!" His voice, normally very soft and husky, rose suddenly to a commander's cutting lash. "She's one person, Chief, and you're talking about a thousand of us! A thousand, and we might lose five, six hundred, charging into a damned hoodoo like a bunch of kids trying to save Mommy from a gang of bandits! You got no right to leave us to that! You got no right to put your woman's life over ours and the Hawk would be the first person to tell you so!"

  "She would if I'd still been the goddam captain, but I'm not!" roared the Wolf back at him. "You are!"

  "Then it's a damn good thing you aren't! You're a puking coward! Yeah, you stay back here where it's safe, where you won't have to meet him ... where you won't have to see if these pox-rotted powers you've been telling us about will cut it in battle!"

  Blind with rage, Sun Wolf's hand came back to strike; Ari caught it, his own face, hard as a steel mask, inches from the Wolf's own.

  His voice was low again, low and hard as flint. "You haven't got the right to leave us ditched, Chief. They're waiting for you."

  He lowered his arm. "No."

  "She'll keep. The battle won't. Head wounds ... "

  "Head wounds change fast," the Wolf said softly. "Yeah, she could stay unconscious for days, or she could go. I don't know how long it'll take, or how long I'll have to stay with her afterwards, until I know she's safe. I'm not losing her, Ari."

  "It'll all be over by noon. Dammit, with a hoodoo there, defending the city ... "

  "Noon if we break the wall fast. But if we get thrown back? If there's street fighting? That can last for hours-God knows how long, with a wizard in it."

  "And you're afraid of him, aren't you?" Ari spat the words at him, and he did not reply. "You know he's better than you, is that it?" He jerked his arm away, breathing hard, his face bitter in the dull burnish of the torchlight. Sun Wolf thought about the siege engines, even now lumbering through the still, unnatural blackness toward Vorsal's walls, remembered his private nightmare of having the bridge of the siege tower collapse beneath him, remembered the thousands of things that could go wrong in an assault, and knew that his men, the men he'd trained and led, the men to whom he'd been captain, friend, and god, were walking into all of them and more. Ari was right. Afraid or not-and he was afraid-a year ago when he'd still been captain, he'd never have chosen the life of any single person-certainly not the life of any of those sweet-scented girls who'd been his bedmates over the years-over going into even the most ordinary, the easiest, the surest battle with his men, let alone one against the dark specter of evil wizardry. Not even Starhawk's.

  It was different now, more different than he'd realized. More different than he'd been prepared to face. He was no longer captain. And he wasn't going to lose Starhawk-not to Opium, not to the curse, not to his own stupidity, and not to what others considered his duty.

  "Chief," said Ari softly, "I'm begging. Don't let us down."

  He whispered, "I can't."

  The words "I'm sorry" were on his tongue, but he did not utter them. Goaded, confused, angry, and hurting more than he'd ever thought possible, he watched Ari turn on his heel and walk away.

  The din of battle came to him, with the slow watering of the leaden darkness beyond the window lattice
s. He was aware of both dawn and tumult distantly, like the sky above water beneath whose surface he hovered. But he could not break the healing trance to sniff the air to see whether rain was on its way and could not lessen his desperate concentration to think about his friends piling across the bridges from the siege towers to meet the wizard on the walls of Vorsal. The part of him that had been a soldier for thirty years identified the sound of battle, and the fact that Renaeka Strata's servants had fallen silent to listen. Then his mind slipped down again, calling Starhawk's name, slowly, thread by thread, spell by spell, weaving her spirit to her flesh until the flesh could sustain it alone.

  All the magic he could marshal, all the strength of his own flesh, he poured through the channel of old Drosis' spells, healing, cleansing, infusing with warmth and life. Once the magic had shown him where to bore, the trephining had been easy. The spells he'd found in Drosis' grimoires were brighter, surer, more flexible than Yirth's, though it had taken Yirth's training to make sense of them. Even in his inexperience, he could recognize the fine-tuned exactness of them, the greater knowledge of the body's workings and the body's needs. He could feel life, like a plasmic light, going from his palms into the cold flesh he touched, to kindle the faded light there.

  When he came out of the trance it was fully day.

  Servants had taken away the blood-filled basin, the scraps of bandages, lint, rags, the water, and the poultices and herbs. All around the bed their feet had scuffed the chalked circles of power and protection to cloudy mare's-tails on the tessellated floor. The lamps that had burned all around him during the operation and his subsequent vigil had guttered out. The latticed doors of the terrace arch stood half-opened, against all medical advice, to let in the morning air, but the bronze silk curtains hung down straight.

  Outside, the air was absolutely still. There was no smell of rain, though the sky was gray and heavy, as it had been for weeks. The noise of battle seemed oddly clear.