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

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  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 kind 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 mer
cenary 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.

  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 wal
ls 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.