The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  Quietly, Sun Wolf moved to the wine cabinet at the far side of the dais from the dim glow of the hearth where the two women sat, and filled two silver goblets of wine.

  “That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it?” demanded Kaletha as Sun Wolf’s shadow fell over her. “Drink—like that pathetic sot Osgard...”

  “My answer to everything is having you relax, woman.”

  “I am relaxed, and I don’t need your wine, nor does ’Shebbeth.” Anshebbeth stopped her hand in mid-reach for the goblet, then obediently folded it with her other in her lap.

  Nanciormis left the little group beside the arched vestibule doors and strode the length of the Hall to the dais to put a gentling hand on Anshebbeth’s shoulder. In the wavery glow of the sconces on either side of the hearth, his curving black brows stood out sharply, as if, beneath the bronze of his tan, he had gone pale at what he had heard.

  “Perhaps Anshebbeth should go up and sit with Lady Taswind,” he suggested softly. “I need to speak with the Captain alone for a few moments.” To Sun Wolf, in private, he had made any number of crude jests at the governess’s expense, but part of his charm lay in his knowing when to say the right thing.

  Shebbeth’s anxious glance shifted from Nanciormis to Kaletha, but Kaletha, still irrationally annoyed with her subservience, looked away in pointed disgust. That she would have been still more annoyed had Anshebbeth not immediately agreed with her, as she had done in the public gardens when the subject of physical love came up, evidently had no bearing on the matter. Anshebbeth, with the tight misery on her face of one who knows she can do no right, gathered her dark skirts and hastened away up the winding stair.

  “At least that gets her out of our hair,” Nanciormis murmured, taking one of the goblets from Sun Wolf’s hand and leading him away from the carved bench where Kaletha now sat alone. “How is Tazey?”

  Sun Wolf shook his head. “Sleeping all right, now,” he said softly. “She’ll live—but I tell you right now, she won’t be the same.”

  The commander let out his breath in a sigh. “Dear Gods—” He used the shirdar word for gods. “Never in a hundred years would I have thought Jeryn would try to go after you. Frankly, I didn’t think the boy had it in him—but it was a stupid thing to say, nevertheless.”

  “What did you say?” The Wolf paused in his step and regarded the commander curiously under the harsh doubled light of a pair of torches on the wall.

  The gold rings that held his braids flashed as Nanciormis shook his head. “I no longer remember exactly, though I should. He’d been whining all afternoon—that Sun Wolf hadn’t made him climb ropes and Sun Wolf hadn’t made him do tumbling and Sun Wolf hadn’t made him lift weights—which I knew perfectly well you had. At last I lost my temper and said that if he preferred your teaching, he should have had the nerve to stand up to his father for you. That’s all. I never meant that he should go after you.” He took a quick gulp of the wine; some of the color was returning to his heavy cheeks. “And now this...”

  Sun Wolf glanced along the Hall to the guards, still grouped in a whispering cluster around the dark archways to the vestibule. “What happened?”

  Nanciormis took another drink and shook his head. “It must have happened sometime late last night,” he said quietly. “Whoever did it has to have been tremendously strong. Nexué was literally hacked into pieces. I don’t know what they used—an axe or a scythe, perhaps...” He swallowed, still shaken by the memory.

  He had seen war, Sun Wolf thought. This was different.

  “A strong man can do a lot of damage with a sword.” He turned his own untouched cup in his hands, watching the torch-glare flash on the dark wine, but not drinking. He had eaten nothing since their nooning stop at the edge of the reg, and he knew his capacity for wine was not what it once had been. “And this happened last night?”

  “Or early this morning. She was found in one of the old workshops in the empty quarter—by the blood trail, she’d been pursued there...”

  “What was she doing down there?”

  Nanciormis let out an ironic bark of laughter. “There’s a servants’ privy near the wall—by the look of it that’s where she was bound, though she could have been going anywhere. Nexué was a sneak and a spy as well as a gossip—there wasn’t much going on in the Citadel she didn’t know about. The empty quarter’s been used for assignations before this.”

  “And she wasn’t found until tonight?” Sun Wolf’s tufted eyebrows plunged down over his nose, making the worn eye patch shift.

  “What with...” Nanciormis hesitated. Even with Osgard snoring in his bedchamber, he was treading softly. “With the uproar over Taswind, no one noticed her absence until this evening when the wind turned.”

  “What about the dogs?”

  “Dogs?” Nanciormis looked blank.

  “There are dogs all over this Fortress. You’re not telling me they weren’t at the corpse.”

  The commander frowned suddenly, seeing the anomaly. “They weren’t,” he said after a moment. “Nor were the ravens, now that you speak of it, and there are always a few of them hanging around the kitchen middens. Now why...?”

  “I’d like to have a look at the place.”

  Nanciormis nodded. Sun Wolf glanced back—Starhawk was sitting on the bench beside Kaletha with her arm around those slender, bowed dark shoulders. The Bishop being out of the room, Egaldus was hunkered down before the White Witch, holding her hands and speaking soft words of comfort to her. Kaletha sat rigid, shaking her head stubbornly again and again.

  Though Sun Wolf said nothing, Starhawk looked up at him and, with a final, gentle pat, rose from Kaletha’s side. As she joined him and they began to walk toward the door of the Hall, Sun Wolf paused and looked back at Nanciormis. “Osgard know?” he asked.

  The commander’s full-lipped mouth quirked with scorn. “Would it do any good if he did?”

  “You’ll have to be gone by daybreak,” Starhawk said as she and the Wolf wound their way through the small courts around the Hold’s long southern side toward the little gate that led to the empty quarter. “Osgard gave me the word I could stay—apparently they really need guards because working in the mines pays twice what the King does—but he made it damn clear I’d better not mention how I happened not to get killed by the sandstorm.”

  “What’s his alternative explanation?”

  She shrugged. Even with the moon on the wane, its light was strong enough to cast shadows beneath the small adobe gateway. Looking back at the Hold, the Wolf could see the glow of the night lamps in Tazey’s rooms, turning the curtained arch to a dully glowing gold like a banked oven. He didn’t remember who all else those rooms belonged to, save for the one with the rose reflection of candlelight, which must be Jeryn’s. He paused in the small gateway, looking down at the sloping path across the little court beyond, and an odd shiver went down his spine at the sight of the black door to the cell he and the Hawk had shared.

  Matter-of-factly, Starhawk went on, “I don’t think he has one, not even for himself.”

  “He’d better,” the Wolf growled. “She’s got to be taught.”

  She glanced up at him in the ivory-yellow moonlight. “Who taught Kaletha, I wonder?”

  He grinned. Starhawk might not be mageborn, but she understood more about how magic had to work than anyone the Wolf had ever talked to. “It occurred to me to wonder that myself when I was up with Tazey. I’ve been thinking Kaletha sprang her ‘destiny’ on the other people here in Tandieras cold, but...There has to have been somebody, even if he never declared his own powers for fear of Altiokis. Beyond a doubt, he or she is dead now, because we haven’t heard of any other wizard—but there could have been another student. If we can find out who that wizard was and back-trail him...”

  “I don’t know,” the Hawk said doubtfully. “I’ve listened to her teach. Now, when you taught back at the warrior’s school in Wrynde, it was always, ‘My father always said...’ or ‘The captain of Queen
Izacha’s bodyguard showed me this...’ But she hands it all down as if she’d invented it.”

  Sun Wolf paused, realizing what it was about Kaletha’s teaching that had rubbed him the wrong way. “In other words, she wouldn’t say.” He leaned his wide shoulders in the broken adobe of the gateway. The moonlight, where it touched his hair, turned it to wan and faded gold. Across the court a pack rat slipped from the door of their cell, ran a few paces, stopped to sit up, sniffing cautiously at the cold air, then dashed in a tiny skiff of thrown sand to the camel-bush beside the old well. “She’s close with her power,” the Wolf went on slowly. “She wants to stay the teacher, to hold her disciples to her—she likes the power it gives. If there is competition for the post, she’s not going to let anyone know. But in a place like this, you can’t hide the kind of relationship teacher and student have to have. It takes years to learn, Hawk—if she’d been that close to someone that long, somebody would know.”

  “’Shebbeth,” Starhawk said promptly. “She’s been here at least ten years. Jealous as she is of anyone who’s Kaletha’s friend, you bet she’d know.”

  “And she’d probably tell,” the Wolf said, “if only to run them down.” He looked back over his shoulder to the amber warmth of the archway at the top of the outside stair. “She’ll keep,” he said. “She’s with Tazey now and shouldn’t be leaving her. Come on.” He shoved himself off the wall with one shoulder and moved out into the cold moonlight of the court, the sandy gravel scrunching under his boots. “There’s a lot to do and not much left of the night.”

  They found Nexué’s tracks easily—Starhawk could have done so herself without Sun Wolf’s ability to see in darkness. Even the scrubby, wire grass and camel-thorn cast frail shadows by the brilliance of the westering moon. The path to the servants’ privies out beyond the stable hugged the wall, but, since the storm, no one had crossed the little court itself. A single line of smudgy marks veered sharply away from the packed earth of the path, first back toward the gate, then away past the cells into the empty quarter.

  “She must have seen someone standing about there in the shadows of the corner of the wall,” the Wolf guessed, studying them. “Or heard something...”

  “Heard, most likely.” Starhawk picked her way carefully through the drifted sand left by the storm. “There are no marks in that shadow.”

  Sun Wolf grunted to himself. He could see where Nexué had changed direction and run, not back toward the gate, but across the court to the mazes of crumbling adobe walls and barred black moonlight of the empty quarter. Circling, he kept his eyes to the ground, moving cautiously so as not to foul other marks. But even with a wizard’s vision in darkness, he saw no print, no mark, no reason that would have caused the old woman to do so.

  Someone on the path, perhaps? In the ensuing twenty-four hours between the incident and its discovery, scores of servants had taken this route to the privies. Still...

  Drift-sand from the storm lay deep in the court, poured in little dunes through the door of the abandoned cell. Nexué’s tracks were only a desperate shuffle—her run must have been slow and scuffling, with sand and pea gravel kicked back in sloppy crescents behind her. If someone had run in her tracks, the footmarks were only blurred dents, tangled with hers.

  Yet something made the Wolf uneasy. The empty quarter lay silent as death around him as he stalked the trail to its obvious and pitiful conclusion—the first drippy smattering of blood, where some swung weapon had made its contact with flesh, then the hand mark where Nexué had stumbled, caught herself, and fled desperately on through the parched, empty courts. The blood had dried during the intervening day, but the old dye shop where she had finally fallen reeked of it still. Looking around him at the dark stains lying like shadows where no shadows should be, Sun Wolf felt a kind of thankfulness that it was now the coldest part of the night and there were no insects.

  Nexué had been a gross and dirty-minded old woman, he thought, but still...By the amount of blood, she must have run about here for a long time.

  What was left of the body had been taken away. The ground was a scuffed muck of confused tracks of the guards, Nanciormis, and the Bishop. Impersonally, Sun Wolf cursed them all.

  “Not a single damn killer’s track,” he muttered as he and Starhawk retraced their route back through the empty courts and the walkways whose roofs had been stripped away by decades of autumn storms and whose shattered rafters slanted down amid the sand drifts to impede their steps. Somewhere in the stillness an owl hooted; there was the swift skitter of sand, a shadow passing soundlessly overhead, and a faint squeak of pain. Sun Wolf’s boots slid heavily in the drifted sand between two walls, then ground on the harsh gravel beyond. “And if they had the wits to run along the tops of the broken walls, they could have gotten clean away without leaving so much as a mark. There’s a dozen dry wells and pits where a weapon and bloodstained clothing could have been dropped...” He paused, frowning, his single eye glinting like transparent amber in the zebra shadows. “I don’t like this, Hawk.”

  She nodded, understanding what he meant. Around them, the empty quarter was silent as death.

  “Could you have done it?”

  “Physically?” She shook her head. “Oh, maybe with one of those big two-handed swords like Eo the Blacksmith used to use—the kind that, even if she hit you with the flat of it, would break your back. But there wasn’t room in some of those corridors to use something like that, and you sure as hell couldn’t do it running. No.” She folded her arms, looking around her at the silent mazes of sand and half-fallen adobe. “I can understand someone wanting to kill her to shut her up about something—the Mother knows she was a spy as well as a gossip and spread her filth around like a monkey. But—they found her literally in pieces, Wolf. Someone chased her through those courts and walls for nearly a hundred yards. What they did to her was more than just murder—and I can think of only one person who was big enough and strong enough to cut her up that way and who wanted to shut her up.”

  Sun Wolf nodded. Before them, the bulk of the Hold was mostly dark now as the final commotions of magic and murder lapsed into exhausted repose. The light still burned in Tazey’s room at one end of the long southern balcony. At the southeastern end of the jagged block of crenelated granite, another rectangle of wine gold showed where a lamp still glowed in the King’s solar.

  The Wolf said slowly, “We can’t know he was the only one, Hawk. There could have been others, for other reasons or maybe for the same reason. But yes—I’d sort of like to know where Osgard was around this time last night.”

  When Sun Wolf ascended the stair that curved up over the Hold’s southern face, the rooms along the balcony were silent. Below and around him, the velvet darkness had turned to ash; eastward, the slag-colored bulk of Mount Morian loomed against the first stains of dawn. Like candlelight caught on a needle’s tip, the spire of the cathedral below glinted with wakening gold. Pinpricks of light across the mountain’s feet showed where men and women were already rising to breakfast in darkness before going on shift in the mines. Standing on the balcony, the Wolf sensed all the furtive movements of the night winding to a close—foxes and coyotes in the empty mile between town and Fortress trotting back to their burrows in the rocks, licking the last dabs of blood from their whiskers, wrens and wheatears waking to whistle their territories in the dark.

  In Tazey’s room, the candles still burned. Sun Wolf, hidden in the fold of shadow and curtain, softly called Anshebbeth’s name, remembering how sound carried against the long southern face of the Hold, but got no reply. Stepping soundlessly across to the inner chamber, he saw Tazey tossing restlessly in unquiet sleep; there was no sign of her governess. He cursed the woman for leaving her and crossed to the bed to lay his hand over the girl’s fingers. They felt hot. Her face looked flushed and swollen, as if with fever; when he bent over her, she turned her head away, whispering desperately, “I won’t! I won’t!”

  With a touch astonishingly light for su
ch massive hands, he brushed aside the snarly hair from her face. “You don’t have to, Tazey,” he murmured, though he could tell she was deep asleep.

  She gave a little sob and quieted; he remained kneeling beside the bed, where he had spent so many hours that afternoon, until she appeared easier in her dreams. It seemed incredible to him that this was part of that same night.

  When her breathing had settled into evenness again, he got to his feet and moved softly through the outer room once more and out to the balcony. As Tazey’s governess, Anshebbeth should have a room near hers, though privately he suspected she was with Kaletha, wherever Kaletha was. ’Shebbeth was genuinely fond of her charge, but he’d seen her abandon Tazey any number of times, when she should have been playing chaperone, to go scurrying to the Witch’s side. And overwrought as she had been down in the Hall earlier, he thought, Kaletha just might have asked it of her.

  But he was wrong.

  The curtains were drawn shut over the next arch, but a strip of roseate light lay like a petticoat hem on the tiles beneath. He listened for a moment, but heard no sound, then gently pushed the curtain aside.

  Anshebbeth startled up from the divan. “My love, what...?” she began, seeing his dark shape against the night; then, as he stepped into the light, her sleep-flushed face scalded crimson, then drained white. She hastily pulled her unfastened gown across her narrow breasts, shaking fingers tangling with the unbound swatches of her black hair as she clutched the collar up to her throat. Her shoes lay separate, fallen, on two sides of the divan; the warm air redolent with the pungence of sex.

  His whole mind one giant, astonished question, Sun Wolf only said, “You should be with Tazey. She shouldn’t be alone.”