The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  “Yes, Chief.”

  Jeryn and Taswind occupied the last two rooms along the balcony shared by the King’s Household. The brazen sun slanted along the dark granite curve of the building’s southern face, hurling the shadows of the two partners like an inky scarf into room after room. Anshebbeth, sitting in one of them, sprang up with a nervous cry, her hands reaching out, her face pale and hollowed with sleepless strain. When she saw who it was, she sank back and resumed twisting her hands.

  Even out on the balcony, Sun Wolf could hear Osgard’s braying voice.

  “I won’t have it, I tell you! That foul-mouthed nag Nexué’s been all over the town, and there isn’t a man who isn’t saying my daughter’s a witch!”

  “Although I take exception to the connotations of the word witch,” Kaletha’s caustic voice said, “you cannot deny that what happened has proved that Taswind is mageborn.”

  “The hell I can’t deny it!” He turned to loom furiously over Kaletha as Sun Wolf pushed aside the patterned curtain that led into the outer chamber of Tazey’s rooms. “She’s no more a witch than her mother was! A sweeter, dearer, more obedient girl never walked the face of the earth, do you hear me?”

  Kaletha only stiffened and looked down her nose at the bloodshot, unshaven, sweaty giant before her. As usual, her dark red hair was pulled back in braids and loops as intricate as potter’s work and her plain black homespun gown spotless; her very fastidiousness a scornful rebuke. “She is mageborn,” she insisted stubbornly. “You owe it to her to let me teach her the ways of power.”

  “I owe it to her to keep her the hell away from you! I won’t have it said, and I’ll personally take and thrash you if you go near her with your sleep-spells and your weather-calling, and your filthy, stolen books! What man’s going to want to marry her, Desert Lord or no Desert Lord, if lies like that go around?”

  Her protuberant blue eyes blazed. “They are not lies, and there is no shame attached to it.”

  “You uppity hag! She’d die of shame before she’d be what you are! Get out of my sight, before I—”

  “If you will admit me instead of that useless, whining Bishop—”

  “To have her be your student?” Osgard roared, losing what little remained of his temper.

  “She needs a teacher, and as I’m the only one—”

  “What my daughter needs is a husband! I’ll have the man crucified who says she’s a witch—or woman, too! I tell you this—she’ll never be a student of yours! Now get out!”

  The inner door curtain moved, its woven pattern of reds and blues like a wind-stirred garden where the edge of the sunsplash hit it. The Bishop Galdron stepped through, white hands folded before his belt. Though minus his brocaded ceremonial tabard, he still reminded Sun Wolf of an overdressed doll, robe and stole and surcoat all worked with a blazing galaxy of jeweled hieratic symbols. His cold blue eyes touched Sun Wolf and the Hawk, still standing in the arched doorway, then moved to Kaletha. Sternly, he said, “Yes, go. You have done harm enough by your mere presence. Better Taswind had died than had damned her soul with witchery.”

  “She’s no witch!” Osgard roared, livid.

  “She is a witch.” The old man’s red lips folded taut within the silky frame of mustaches. “And as a witch, she is damned...”

  “Get out off here, both of you!” Osgard’s face was scarlet, a tear-streaked mess of graying stubble and broken veins. “You should talk about witchery, you stinking hypocrite, when your own acolyte has been keeping company with Kaletha for months!”

  Galdron turned, startled and deeply shocked, and Kaletha could not repress a smile of smug and vicious triumph at his discomfiture. Then she swept past Sun Wolf and out onto the balcony. Galdron, face pink with anger, hastened at her heels. The curtain swirled in the backwash of their wake, then settled over the folded-back storm shutters once more.

  Sun Wolf remained, facing the King.

  “You...” Osgard’s voice was thick and slurred. “You—it’s your fault. My son ran away to see you...”

  “Your son ran away because he was too scared of you to speak for me, and your daughter was too scared to ask your help.” Sun Wolf folded his arms, his whole body relaxed into battle-waiting, a deceptive, hair-trigger readiness. “Now will you let me save her life, or are you going to have her die to prove yourself right?”

  Osgard’s face went white with speechless anger; Sun Wolf wondered clinically if he would suffer a stroke on the spot. Then, with a bellow like an exploding furnace, he roared, “I’ll have you crucified for that! Guards!” In a swirling gust of stale wine fumes the King sprang for Sun Wolf’s throat.

  Reflecting in the split second between the King’s attack and his own reaction that his father had been right when he’d cautioned him, in the name of all his ancestors, never to mess with magic or argue with drunks, Sun Wolf sidestepped the attack. He blocked the outstretched hands with a swipe of one forearm and used the other hand to deliver a neat, straight punch to the stubbly jaw that the King walked directly into.

  Osgard went down like a felled tree.

  Sun Wolf stepped back from the unconscious King just as Nanciormis and half a dozen guardsmen came bursting through the door that led down to the inner stair from the Hall. For a moment the Wolf and Nanciormis faced one another across the slumped body, the guards clustering at his back and clutching their sword hilts in readiness for anything. Then the commander turned to the guards and said gravely, “His Majesty is fatigued. Take him to his room.”

  He stepped aside as they bore the King out past him and down the stairs, watching inscrutably until they turned the corner down into the Hall. Then he glanced back at Sun Wolf.

  “I see I was wrong about the uses of magic,” he said quietly. “Do what you can for her. I’ll see you’re left alone.”

  “I’d call that magnanimous of him,” Starhawk remarked softly, as the commander passed through the wide arch out onto the balcony and thence, presumably, to his own room down at its farther end. “Except that he waited until he was damn sure nobody was around to hear him say it.”

  “Maybe.” Sun Wolf watched thoughtfully as the vast curtain settled back to stillness once more against the hard glare of the arch. “He’s a politician, Hawk—and as a politician he deals with the way things are, not how they’re supposed to be. Whatever else can be said about him, he’s enough of a shirdar lord to know that magic has nothing to do with the Bishop’s threats of Hell.”

  He turned for the inner door to Tazey’s room, and Starhawk said quietly, “’Shebbeth should be here.”

  He stopped, a little surprised knowing she was right. For all she was a soldier, the Hawk had a woman’s acute sensitivity to social usages. “If you think she’d be of any use, you’re welcome to go look for her,” he said. “Though it’s my guess Osgard turned her out—and no wonder.”

  Starhawk paused, remembering the governess’ tear-streaked face and hysterical hand-wringing, glimpsed through the balcony door, and said no more on the subject.

  The windows of Tazey’s small bedroom faced northwest, toward the harsh chaparral desert and the rugged mountains beyond. At this time of the day, the room was flooded with sunlight and, with the windows tightly shut in accordance with good medical practice, unbearably hot and close. The air was heavy with the smells of burned herbs, sickly after the dry movement of the desert air from which Sun Wolf had come. Tazey lay stretched out on her narrow bed; but for the movement of her young breasts under the sheet, she might have been dead already. Her tan stood out like a bad coat of paint against the underlying waxiness of her flesh; from the corners of her shut eyes ran the dried tracks of tears wept in her sleep.

  Hesitantly, Sun Wolf knelt beside the bed and took the girl’s hand in his. It felt cold. He counted the pulse, when he found it after long search, and it was leaden as a stream choked with winter ice. A lifetime on the battlefield had given him a certain skill at rough-and-ready surgery; later, Yirth of Mandrigyn had shown him the spells to ho
ld the failing spirit to the flesh until the flesh had time to respond to medicines. But this was not a matter of the flesh at all. The symptoms resembled, if anything, those of freezing and exhaustion.

  He had no idea where to start. He had healed warriors with warriors’ means, but this was different. In the last nine months, he had done a very little healing by means of the few spells Yirth had taught him and had always been astonished when they worked. He looked down now at the girl’s browned face against the pillow, the scattered, sun-streaked hair, and the blue smudges of exhaustion that shadowed the tensed eyelids. For the first time, he released his hold on a warrior’s readiness and felt grief for her, grief and a terrible pity for what had befallen her.

  He remembered her in the war dance—the light, buoyant strength of her movements, the joy in her eyes at being only what she was. In the few days he’d been in Tandieras he’d become fond of her, with a virile middle-aged man’s affection for a young girl, that odd combination of paternalism and a sort of nonpersonal lust. But she was, he understood now, a wizard like himself, perhaps stronger than he. And she would be as terrified of her powers as he was of his. The sweetest daughter a man could want, her father had said of her. No wonder she was terrified to find herself, against her will, the thing he most wanted for her not to be. No wonder that knowledge drove her power inward, until her very soul was eating her body with guilt and grief and shame.

  He let go of her hand and rose to open the casements of the windows, letting in the dry smell of the desert—the comforting mingle of stables, sage, and sky. Voices drifted to him—Kaletha’s short and defiant from the courts below, the Bishop’s full of querulous rage. Closer, he heard Anshebbeth’s sobs, muffled, as if against bedding or a man’s shoulder. Taking a stump of chalk from his pocket, he drew on the red-tiled floor around the bed one of the Magic Circles, a precautionary measure against evils that Yirth, when she had taught him this one, had been unable to define clearly. After a moment’s thought, he also traced the runes of wizardry, of life, of strength, of journeys undertaken and safely completed—marks that would draw to them the constellations of influences and could help to focus his mind. It was all done by rote—he had never used them before and had no idea how to do so, but went through the motions as he would have undertaken weapons drill with an unfamiliar piece of equipment. There was no sense neglecting his teaching simply because it meant nothing to him yet.

  He returned to the bed and took Tazey’s hand.

  He wondered if it was imagination, if it felt colder than it had. He drew three deep breaths and settled his mind to meditation. Clumsily, hesitantly, he pushed aside all the crowding worries and resentments, the random thoughts that the mind flings up to disguise its fear of stillness. He gathered light around him and, as if sinking into deep water, he sought the Invisible Circle, where he knew he would find Tazey hiding from herself.

  She woke up crying. For a long time, she lay with her face turned away from him, sobbing as if everything within her body and soul had been torn out of her—as indeed, Sun Wolf thought, almost too weary for pity, it had been. He himself felt little but an exhaustion all out of proportion to the short time he felt he had meditated. Then, gently making her roll over, he rubbed her back as he had seen market women rub babies to soothe their wordless griefs.

  Only after a time did he notice that the room was cool. The air outside the broad window had been drenched with light and heat when he had sunk into meditation; it was dark as pitch now. Listening, he tried to determine from the sounds in the building below how late it was, but that was difficult, for Tazey’s illness had cast a pall of silence over the Citadel. Someone—Starhawk, probably—had kindled the two alabaster night lamps that rested on the carved ebony clothes chest, and molten lakes of light wavered on the ceiling above.

  He felt weak and a little strange, as if he had swum for miles. His legs, doubled up under him, were stiff and prickly as he shifted position. For a long time, he was content to remain where he was, only rubbing the girl’s back to let her know she was not alone. He had found her in the desolate country that borders the lands of death, wandering, crying, in darkness; he knew, and she knew, that she had not wanted to come back with him.

  After a long time she turned her head on the pillow and whispered, “Is my father very angry?”

  She was a mage like himself now, and he could not lie to her. Moreover, in the shadowlands of the soul there is always a bond between those who have sought and those who have been found. He said, “Yes. But you can’t let that rule you anymore.”

  She drew in a quick breath and held it for a few seconds before letting it go. “I didn’t want this,” she said at last, her voice very thin. She lifted her face from the pillow, ugly, swollen, cut up with the violence of the sandstorm and crumply with tears. Her absinthe-green eyes were circled in lavender smudges, the eyes of the woman she would one day be. “I tried...”

  “Jeryn knew enough to ask you where I was.”

  She nodded miserably. “I used to find things when I was little and he was just a baby. Once when he got lost in the old quarter of the Fortress I found him just by—by shutting my eyes and thinking about him. That’s how I knew you were in Wenshar and how I knew he’d gone after you. But later I—I tried not to do it anymore.” She sniffled, and wiped her reddened nose. “Does this mean that I’m damned?”

  “It means that Galdron will say you are.”

  She was silent for a time, digesting this distinction, then said, “I didn’t want this. I don’t want to be a witch. Witches are...”

  She paused and looked up at him.

  “No one’s asking you to decide right now,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “But I, for one, want to thank you, with all my heart, for saving the Hawk’s life. You saved Jeryn, too, and your friends Pothero and Shem.”

  “But they’re afraid of me now,” she murmured, and another tear crept down her puffy cheek.

  “Probably,” he agreed. “But I don’t think Jeryn is, and I know the Hawk’s not—so it isn’t everybody.”

  Her voice was distant, wistful, as if she already knew she was speaking of someone else. “I don’t want to change. I mean—I might not like what I’ll become.”

  Tenderly, he brushed aside the snarly rats of her dust-laden hair. “Then don’t change tonight,” he replied. “You can’t change at three in the morning anyway, nobody can...” Her sob caught on a laugh. “Sleep now.”

  “Will you...” She swallowed, embarrassed. “Do you think you could—could stay with me for a little while? I had dreams...When I was asleep, before you found me, I dreamed...awful things. The Witches...”

  “I’ll be here,” he reassured her softly, weary as he was from the long day’s ride and from last night’s watching. (He had been known to sit for longer than this in all-night watches on some enemy camps.) He held Tazey’s hand, large and strong and warm now in his own, while her soft breathing evened toward dreamless sleep. Detachedly, he studied the smudgy, chalked circles around the bed—the Circle of Light, Yirth had called one, and the Circle of Darkness, though why they were so called she had not known. He shook his head. Kaletha was right, he thought. She would have to be taught, and he knew that neither he, nor, he suspected, Kaletha, was equipped to do it.

  Another thought crossed his mind, and he frowned, wondering why it had not occurred to him before—not only for Tazey, but for himself.

  Tazey murmured something, stirred in her sleep, and then lay quiet again. Though she still slept lightly, he could see no dreams tracking her discolored eyelids. Soundless, as if on patrol, he climbed stiffly to his feet and crossed to the curtained door.

  “Hawk?” he said softly into the dimness beyond.

  There was no reply.

  He stepped past the curtain to the candlelit outer room. Muted radiance played over the carved wooden armoire, the oak chairs with their red leather seats, and the little round corner fireplace. On the polished sideboard, a couple of candles in silver holders shed soft r
ings of brightness. The heavy curtains had been drawn over the archway to the balcony—a stray gust of dry wind stirred them, a ripple of reflected flame danced along their gilt borders. There was no one there.

  He walked to the other doorway, which led to the inner stair down to the Hall. Through it he could see torchlight and shadow from the hall below playing across the stone vaults. A muffled clamor of voices came to him, rising and falling, agitated but unintelligible. If Galdron’s making more trouble for her, he thought grimly, or Nexué...If Kaletha’s carrying on again about her poxy rights...

  A shadow swept across the red glow from beneath, and a moment later he heard a cat-soft stride on the stairs that could only be Starhawk’s.

  “What is it?” he asked when she appeared in the doorway.

  Her face inexpressive, she said, “Nexué the laundress.”

  Sun Wolf’s single yellow eye glinted dangerously. “What’s the bitch been up to now?”

  “Not much,” said Starhawk calmly. “She’s dead.”

  Chapter 7

  WITH QUIET VICIOUSNESS, Anshebbeth said, “I can’t say I’m surprised to hear it. Sooner or later someone was bound to wring that filthy old woman’s neck.” She stared into the fire with dark eyes that smoldered like the logs crumbling there.

  “Don’t talk like that.” Kaletha shot her an angry sidelong glance; in her black homespun lap, Sun Wolf observed that her hands were shaking.

  The governess looked up at her, hurt at the rebuke. “You—” she began, and Kaletha cut her off.

  “Hatred is an impurity of the soul as foul as the fornications of the body,” she said too quickly. “If I’ve taught you nothing else, you should have learned that.”

  Her dark eyes filling with wounded tears, Anshebbeth nodded, her hand stealing to her tightening throat as she mumbled that she had not meant it. Annoyed, Kaletha looked away. Egaldus, talking quietly with Nanciormis, the Bishop, and two shaken-looking guardsmen down near the door, raised his head at the shrillness of her words; but after a moment’s hesitation, he stayed where he was.