The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  They left the magical silence of the foothills, to climb the Stren Water Valley.

  Fed by the drowning rains on the uplands above, the Stren Water roared in full spate, spreading its channels throughout the narrow, marshy country that lay between the higher cliffs, cutting off hilltops to islands, and driving those farmers who eked their living from its soil to their winter villages on the slopes above. Starhawk and Anyog made their way along the rocky foothills that bordered the flooded lands, always wet, always cold. Anyog told tales and sang songs; of wizardry and Altiokis, they did not speak.

  They made a dozen river crossings a day—sometimes of boggy little channels of the main flood, sometimes of boiling white streams that had permanent channels. At one of these, they lost the packs and almost lost the mule as well. Starhawk suspected that the struggle with the raging waters had broken something within Anyog; after that, he had a white look about the mouth that never left him and he could not travel more than a few miles without a rest.

  She had always been a blisteringly efficient commander, using her own supple strength to drive and bully her men to follow. But she found that her fears for Sun Wolf, though unabated, left room for a care for the old man, who she was sure now would never be able to help her, and she broke the journey to give him a day’s rest while she hunted mountain sheep in the high rock country to the northwest.

  She was coming back from this when she found the tracks of the mercenaries.

  It had been a small band—probably not more than fifteen, she guessed, studying the sloppy trail in the fading afternoon light. Their mere presence in the valley told her they were out of work and had been so for at least three months, since the rains had begun, holed up somewhere, living off the land by hunting or pillage—too small a group to be hired for anything but tribal war between the Thanes; and most of the Thanes in these parts hadn’t the money to hire, anyway, and wouldn’t go to war in the winter if they could.

  Starhawk cursed. Her experience with out-of-work mercenaries was that they were always a nuisance and generally robbers to boot; she would have to trail them to make sure where they were headed and what they were up to before she would feel safe returning to camp.

  She had shot a sheep in the high rocks, one of the small, shaggy crag jumpers, and was carrying the carcass over her shoulders. She hung it from the limb of a tree to keep it from wolves and hung her coat up with it; she might want her arms free. Then she transferred her sword from her back, where she’d been carrying it on the hunt, to her hip, restrung her bow, and checked her arrows. She had been a mercenary for a long time—she was under no illusions about her own kind.

  The trail was fresh; the droppings of the few horses still steamed in the cold evening. She found the place where they’d turned aside from the main trail through the hills at the sight of Anyog’s campfire—she could still see the smoke of it herself, rising through the trees from the wooded hollow where she’d left him. As she clambered cautiously down the rocks that skirted the downward trail, she began to hear their voices, too, and their laughter.

  She muttered words that did greater credit to her imagination than to her convent training. They wanted horses, of course. She hoped to the Mother that Anyog had more sense than to antagonize them—not that anything would be likely to help him much, if they were drunk—which, by the sound of it, they were.

  She’d chosen the campsite carefully—a wooded dell surrounded by thin trees with a minimum of large boulders, difficult to spy into and impossible to sneak up on. She pressed her body to the trunk of the largest available tree and looked down into the dell.

  There were about a dozen men, and they were drunk. One or two of them she thought she recognized—mercenaries were always crossing one another’s paths, and most of them got to know one another by sight. The leader was a squat, hairy man in a greasy doublet sewn over with iron plates. It was before him that Anyog knelt on hands and knees, his gray head bowed and trickling with blood.

  At this distance it was hard to hear what the leader was saying, but it was obvious the robbers had already appropriated the livestock. Starhawk could see the two horses and the mule among the small cavy of broken-down nags at the far edge of the clearing; the camp was strewn with cooking gear, and a couple of snaggle-haired camp followers stood among the half circle of men with her and Anyog’s bedrolls. She barely felt her anger in the midst of her calculations. The horses were unguarded at the rear of the cavy, since most of the men were up front, watching the fun with Anyog. The animals would provide better cover if she could get to them.

  More laughter burst from the circle of men; a couple of them jostled for a better position. She saw the leader’s hand move, and Anyog began to crawl, evidently after something thrown into the muddy pine needles. Bawling with laughter, the mercenary captain reached out his boot and kicked the old man in the side, sending him sprawling. Doggedly, Anyog got back to his hands and knees and continued to crawl.

  Starhawk was familiar with the game; paying for the horses, it was called. A player threw coppers at greater and greater distances and made the poor bastard crawl after them while everyone kicked him over. The game was on a par with ducking the mayor of the village, or forcing his wife to clean the captain’s boots with her hair—the sort of thing that went on during the sacking of a town. It was hilariously funny if a person was drunk, of course, or had just survived a battle that could have left him feeding the local cats on his spilled guts.

  But sober, and watching it played on a man who had done her nothing but kindness, she felt both anger and distaste. It was, she saw, akin to rape; and like rape, it could easily get out of hand and end with the victim dead as well.

  She began to edge her way through the trees toward the far side of the cavy. The gathering darkness helped her—it had been blackly overcast all day, with snow falling lightly in the high country where she had hunted; the world smelled of rain and frost. The men, moreover, aside from being drunk, were totally engrossed in their game. Anyog was kicked down again and lay where he had fallen. It was hard to tell in the twilight, but Starhawk thought he was bleeding from the mouth. She decided then that, whether or not they offered him further injury, she would kill them. One of the camp followers, a slut of sixteen or so, walked over to the old man and kicked him to make him get up; Starhawk saw his hands move as he struggled to rise.

  The mercenaries closed in around him.

  It took her a few extra seconds to cut the reins of the horses from the tether rope; the men were yelling and laughing and never saw her until she was mounted. She fired into their midst, calmly and without rage; her first arrow took the captain straight through the throat, above the iron-plated doublet; her second pinned the camp follower between the breasts.

  She was mounted; the height and the weight of the horse gave her an edge over their numbers, though later she suspected that she would have taken on the twelve of them, even had she been afoot. She came plowing in among them from the darkness, the last light flashing from her sword blade as from the sickle of the Death Goddess of ancient days—silent, inhuman, merciless as the Plague Star. She killed two before they even had their weapons drawn, and the horse accounted for a third, rearing as they closed around it and smashing the man’s skull with an iron-shod hoof. Another man seized her leg to pull her down and she took his hands off at the wrists. She left him standing, screaming, staring at the spouting stumps, as she turned and beheaded the other camp follower and another man who was grabbing at her from the opposite side. Two men had the bridle, dragging and twisting to pull the horse down; she dug in her heels and drove the animal straight ahead over them, so that they had to release their grip or be trampled. One of them she hacked through the shoulder as she went by, and he crumpled, screaming and kicking in the plowed, wet pine mast.

  All this she did calmly, without feeling. She was a technician of death and good at her job; she knew what she wanted to do. The men were running in all directions, drunk and confused. Someone got to the
packs; a moment later, an arrow embedded itself in the saddletree a few inches from her leg. She wheeled the horse and rode at the man. Another shaft sang wide beside her, his aim erratic from panic or from cheap gin; then he dropped his bow and ran, and she cut him through the spine as she overtook his flight.

  The men who were chasing the fleeing horses she brought down with arrows, as if they were hares. Only the last stood and fought her, sword to sword, when her arrows were spent; and though she was dismounted by this time and he was both larger and heavier than she, she had the advantage of speed.

  She pulled her grating sword blade from his ribs, wiped it on his clothes, and turned back to where Anyog lay in the trampled slush. The cold brightness of battle still clung to her; she looked down at the crumpled body and thought, Another deader.

  Then the grief hit her, like the howling of a wolf at the moon.

  She looked around her at the bodies that lay like dark lumps of mud against the slightly lighter blur of the pine needles. The air smelled heavy with blood, like a battlefield; already foxes were creeping from the woods, sniffing at the carrion. In the night, there would be wolves. She saw that at least one of the mercenaries had been a woman, something that she hadn’t noticed in the heat of the fight. And none of their deaths would bring Anyog back.

  Gently, she knelt beside him and turned him over. His breath caught in a gasp of pain; she saw that he was not, in fact, dead; but he would have to be a powerful wizard indeed to pull himself back from the darkness now. Around her, the trees began to whisper under the falling of rain.

  Starhawk worked through the night, rigging a shelter for him and for the fire she built, and making a travois. Beyond the circle of the firelight, she was conscious of continual movement, of faint snarlings and growls, and huge green eyes that flashed with the reflected light. The single horse she had salvaged—one of Pel Farstep’s—snorted with fear and jerked at its tether, but nothing threatened them from the rainy blackness. The kill was fresh and enough to glut a pack.

  The sodden dawn was barely glimmering through the trees when she moved on. She collected what little food the mercenaries had carried, plus several skins of raw liquor—Blind White, it was called—and all the arrows she could recover. As she was tying Anyog to the travois, the dark eyes opened, glazed with pain, and he whispered, “Dove?”

  “I’m here,” she said gruffly. “Uncle, I’m sorry. I...”

  His voice was a thread. “Couldn’t let you face...Altiokis...alone...”

  He coughed, bringing up blood. Starhawk stood up and went to hang the rest of their meager supplies over the various projections of the saddle, fighting the guilt that came from bitter enlightenment and the sudden understanding of why Anyog had joined her in her hopeless quest. She stood for a moment, leaning her throbbing head against the horse’s withers while the rain streamed down through her pale, dripping hair. Ram had taken his courage in his hands, as he had said, and spoken to her; and having spoken, had been turned down. Perhaps it was Anyog’s age that had robbed him of the courage to speak, or perhaps it was the prior knowledge that his love for her would not be returned. But it was the old man, not the young, who had come with her to his death.

  Starhawk sighed. She had learned a long time ago that crying only wasted time. They had a long road to go.

  It was almost nightfall before they came to shelter. Because she could not scout the countryside, Starhawk backtrailed the mercenaries, hoping that they had spent the previous night in a place not too exposed to the elements. The rain had lightened through the afternoon, but the cold was deeper, and she began to fear snow. The road led them up the hard, rocky tracks into the higher foothills, skirting the deep flood meres and the sour bogs that surrounded them. In the end, it led her to a high valley, a sort of bay wedged among the tall cliffs, where a chapel had been built, looking like something that had grown of itself from the lichened stones.

  The chapel was filthy. It had clearly served as a stable, and its altar had been further defiled by all the gross usages of which drunken and violent men were capable when they grew bored. Starhawk was used to this kind of thing and had moreover been raised to believe that the worship of the Triple God was an intellectualized heresy; nevertheless, she was angered that men would treat holy things so, simply because they were holy.

  Still, the roof was intact, and the single doorway narrow enough to forbid the entrance of wild beasts, if a fire were kindled there. She cleared a place among the mess to lay Anyog down and set about gathering damp brushwood, then barked her knuckles with flint and steel lighting it.

  It snowed in the night, with bitter wind keening around the open chapel door. By dawn, it was obvious to Starhawk that Uncle Anyog would never recover.

  Yet he was too tough to die quickly. He lingered on the cloudy borderlands of death, sometimes in a cold sleep that she would have mistaken for death, had it not been for the painful wheezing of his breath, other times weeping and raving feebly of Altiokis, of the nuuwa, of his sister, or singing snatches of poems and songs in a cracked little voice like the grating of a rusty hinge. Occasionally he was lucid enough to recognize her cropped hair and brass-studded doublet as the marks of a trooper and struggled with feeble determination against the gruel she fed him or the water she washed him with.

  On the third night of this, it crossed her mind that the sensible thing to do would be to kill him and go on with her quest. There was no hope of his recovery—even if what remained of the little wizardry he had been taught was strong enough to pull him back from death, it would be long before he could embark on another journey by travois. One way or the other, she would have to free Sun Wolf from the Citadel of the Wizard King alone, without the aid of a wizard—without the hope now of ever finding one.

  It was better that she got on with it and did not delay further.

  Yet she stayed. The cold deepened over the high peaks, and the snow locked its grip on the valley tighter. Daily the Hawk trudged to the few tufts of birch and aspen at the lower end of the little valley by the spring to cut firewood. She saw in the snow the marks where deer had pawed at the crust to feed on the dead grasses underneath; she hunted, and the calm absorption of it eased her heart. During the night she meditated, contemplating in the stillness of the Invisible Circle the truths of her own violent soul. In spite of her own faith in the Mother, she tended the altar of the Triple God, ridding the chapel of its pollutions and cleansing the stone with ritual fire; and in that, too, she found comfort.

  Night after night she sat listening to Anyog’s quiet murmuring and staring out into the still darkness of the silent valley and the flooded lands beyond.

  What had happened to her, she wondered, those weeks in Pel Farstep’s tall stone house? She did not want to become like them, like the busy, bustling Pel or the placid Gillie. So why did her mind keep returning to that peaceful place and the small beauties of everyday things?

  Would she even love the Wolf when she met him again, or would she find that he was like the men she had killed, brutish, dirty, and crass?

  The Mother knew, she’d seen him perform worse outrages than that when they’d sacked cities.

  But her own experience with the wild, careless arrogance of victory prevented her from thinking that what one did during a sack was what one would do in cold blood.

  Would it be better if she found that she did not love him, for that matter? Had Fawnie had the right idea, to marry a well-off man who would cherish her?

  If the Wolf was a mercenary like the others, why did she still love him enough to seek him? And if she still loved him with that same determination, why did she not kill Anyog, who was dying anyway, bury him, and leave?

  From there she would settle herself into meditation; but the answers that she found within its stillness were not the answers that she sought.

  One night the wind changed, squalling down over the mountains in a fury of driving, intermittent rain. Droplets hissed loudly in the little fire; Starhawk could hear its fit
ful beating against the stone walls of the chapel, but within the hollow darkness at the far end of the holy place, the altar lights burned with a steady, hypnotic glow. Her mind focused upon them, drawing them into herself, and the light and darkness merged and clarified into one entity—rain and earth, wind and silence, that which was known and that which was yet to be—the single Circle of Is.

  She found herself in another wind-sounding darkness, hearing the far-off beating of the sea. She knew the place well—the Mother’s chapel on the cliffs, part of the Convent of St. Cherybi, which she had left to follow Sun Wolf to learn the ways of war. She had heard of other nuns doing this, for each point of the Invisible Circle was each point, everywhere, and it was possible, she had heard, to step from one to another. Moonlight shone down through the sky-hole, the only illumination in that dark place, a blinding sliver on the edge of her drawn sword. Peace filled her, as it had always done here. She wondered if this were a dream of her past, but knew, even as she formulated the thought, that it was not so. There were small changes from what she had known—weather stains on the floor and the walls, slight shifts in the way the vessels stood upon the bare stone of the shadow-obscured altar—which told her that she was truly there, and this did not surprise her.

  When she saw Sun Wolf, standing in the darkness near the door, she knew that he, too, was truly there—that he had come there to find her...

  She had never cried as an adult. But when she returned to the barren darkness of the chapel in the Stren Water Valley, tears were icy on her face, and exultation and bitter grief warred in her heart.

  I’m sorry I did not know it in time, he had said. And yet, when he lay dying in Mandrigyn, he had contrived to come to her.

  So near, she thought. Had I not stayed in Pergemis with Fawn...