“No—of course not—” she twittered inaudibly, fumbling at buttons, her huge dark eyes cast down. “That is—I came in here to—to lie down. I was so tired—the news about Nexué...”
He looked from the rucked cushions of the divan to her narrow white toes, peeping, somehow obscene, from beneath the crumpled skirts. Starhawk, he thought, would be vastly interested, as he was himself—it came to him in a burst of enlightenment why ’Shebbeth had spoken out in favor of carnality and called down Kaletha’s scorn on her head.
“It’s none of my business,” he said quietly. “But I have to be gone from here at dawn, and there’s something I want to ask you.”
She turned back, her narrow face suspicious as she finger-combed her thick hair back, her black eyes darting over the tiled floor in quest of hairpins. They were strewn everywhere, as a man’s plucking hand would leave them scattered. Sun Wolf picked up two and walked over to give them to her. He had never considered her a pretty woman, though physical beauty meant less to him that it once had; more than her thin, pointy plainness, her obsessive clinginess repulsed him. The cruel jests Nanciormis made of her were not entirely unjustified. She took the hairpins from his hand without touching his fingers; her eyes did not meet his. “What?” she asked.
He did not sit on the divan, knowing she would have shrunk from him. “It’s to help Tazey,” he said gently, and she relaxed a little and looked up into his face. “And she’s going to need help.”
Anshebbeth drew in her breath and let it go in a tense sigh. She was taut as wet rope, as if holding herself in. Sun Wolf fetched a chair from against the wall and sat opposite her; he saw her relax a little more, now that his physical size did not tower over her. Shrilly, she said, “Kaletha is more than willing to help. But that—that pathetic sot of a father of hers won’t let her.” She brought out Kaletha’s words pat. “He’d rather see her die than admit she was born with the power.”
“I know,” said the Wolf. “That’s what I need to talk to you about. Tazey’s father and Kaletha don’t get along—I think that’s one reason he’s refusing to accept her help or the help of any of her students.”
“He’s just being unreasonable,” she returned, speaking rapidly, still not meeting his eyes. She pushed one hairpin in, but dropped the other nervously. It glinted in her sable lap with the coppery gleam of the lamp. “He’s a stubborn old drunkard who won’t see Kaletha’s power, her skill, her destiny—”
Sun Wolf held up his hand. “I know that. But neither you, I, nor Kaletha, can help what he is.”
“He can admit he’s been wrong...”
“But he won’t.”
“He should,” she insisted stubbornly, and Sun Wolf felt a surge of sympathy for Nanciormis’ cruel jokes.
“And he may—but maybe not early enough to help Tazey.” Anshebbeth started to make a comeback to this, and he went resolutely on. “All we can do is deal with the situation as it is. Osgard doesn’t believe Kaletha, doesn’t credit her power, I think partly because he’s known her all her life. But another wizard might have a chance.”
“It’s Kaletha’s right to be her teacher.” The thin white hands clenched in her lap as she leaned forward. “It’s her destiny.”
“Maybe,” said Sun Wolf, wondering how Anshebbeth could go on championing the cause of a teacher who he had seen treat her like an importunate dog. “But if there’s a fight over it with Osgard, it’s Tazey who’s going to suffer.”
Anshebbeth’s mouth tightened, as if she would protest Kaletha’s rights in the matter yet again, but she did not. She looked down at her long, thin hands, turning the fallen hairpin over and over again in her lap, and said nothing.
“Who was Kaletha’s teacher?”
She raised her eyes at that and answered immediately, pride in her voice. “Oh, she didn’t have one.”
Sun Wolf frowned. “What do you mean, didn’t have one? You don’t just...just make up spells. Someone has to teach you.”
The governess shook her head, the expression on her face the smug, proud look of a girl who is friends with the prettiest girl in school. “Kaletha didn’t need a teacher. And, in any case, there was no one—since the destruction of Wenshar, there has been violent, unreasonable prejudice against the mageborn throughout these lands. Her destiny led her to books of magic, lost for centuries, but she had the power before then. I knew it even when she was just a young girl and I first came here to be Taswind’s governess. It glowed out of her, like the flame in an alabaster lamp.” Her face changed as she remembered that imperious red-haired girl; soft eagerness suffused her voice. “She was seventeen, beautiful, proud, and pure—even then—as if she knew her destiny. And there were many men who—who—who would have dishonored her purity, if they could. But she was strong, disdaining such abasement...” Her voice faltered, and color mounted again in her pale cheeks. She hastened on, “Right from the beginning, though I am the elder, it was she who was my teacher, not I hers. She—”
“What books?” He had heard her on the subject of Kaletha before. Osgard’s words came back to him, your filthy, stolen books...“Where did she get them?”
“She would never say.” Her hand fidgeted nervously at her throat, but she looked glad to speak of something other than Kaletha’s idea of purity. “I never saw them, myself. But if it had not been the books, she would have grown in her powers in some other way. And it is much harder,” she added nervously, “to achieve that kind of skill simply from books without a teacher. All that she has, she has striven for herself—with meditation, self-denial, and—and her own mind. She is one of those people who cannot help but be great. I...” Her voice trailed off. Nervously, she stroked the disheveled cushions of the divan, her black hair spilling down, all wrinkled from its braids, to curtain her crimsoning face. “I will never be great. My honor is—has always been—to help her. She knows this. We understand one another.”
She understands you, anyway, the Wolf thought, with cynical pity. You poor deluded bitch. But he only said, “Where are these books?”
But Anshebbeth would only shake her head, unwilling—or unable—to say.
Starhawk was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. He tried to think when she must last have slept, before riding out to Wenshar to fetch him—and, that, after the sandstorm and all that had happened since. But as usual, she gave the impression that, if he had suggested immediate and bloody battle, she would only have asked in which direction the enemy lay.
He sighed. He himself felt utterly weary, the tiredness coming on him suddenly, like the rising tides of the distant sea. Daylight and darkness memories telescoped together: bluish lights wavering among pillared shadows upon which they cast no brightness; Osgard’s thick, slurring voice raised in anger; and a single line of desperately stumbling footprints through the drifted sand of an empty, moonlit court. The moon stood now over the Binnig Rock, a baroque pearl on the gray silk sky.
“You’d better go.” Starhawk leaned her elbow on the smooth granite of the balustrade, the line of her body reminding him of a lioness in its easy strength. He saw now she’d washed and changed clothes at some time during the night; she was always as clean as a cat when she wasn’t up to her elbows in other people’s blood. “They tell me you can make a pretty decent living as a miner—the pay’s twice what guards get.”
Sun Wolf looked up at the line of dark archways on the balcony above—the balcony where he remembered Starhawk saying she’d seen a man slip into one of those rooms, and heard a woman’s startled cry, on the night he and Nanciormis had come walking back from drinking with the King. He remembered, too, Starhawk’s voice that night, calling out to him from the frosted moonlight of the court, warning him of danger whose existence she could not prove.
Then he glanced back toward the dove-colored bulk of that gate. Nexué had passed through it, on her way to what had turned out to be her death. He wondered if the birds in the empty quarter had been silent that morning, as they had been when he had found the slaughtered doves.
“I don’t think I should leave, Hawk,” he said quietly.
Her tone was judicious. “King’s gonna be sore when he sees you in the Hall for breakfast.”
He didn’t take up her jest. “Smuggle me some. I’ll be a couple of courtyards into the empty quarter.” Even as he said it, he felt a shiver, remembering again the blood-splattered adobe, the sifted gray dust untouched by tracks. Beyond the little gate he could see the maze of walls and rafters and courtyards filled with drifted sand and broken tiles—the unburied corpse of a fortress. The woman beside him straightened up and tucked her hands into her sword belt, a stance she had picked up over the years from him. The first glow of dawn glinted like cold steel dew on the studding of her jerkin. She regarded him with eyes the color of the gray-winter sky, not surprised. But then, the Hawk was never surprised.
“Why ever Nexué was killed, that butchering wasn’t the act of a sane man. And maybe it wasn’t the act of a man at all. There’s a stink about this, Hawk, a stink of evil. I don’t know who’s going to need protection, but somebody sure as hell will.”
Chapter 8
THROUGHOUT THAT DAY and the next, Sun Wolf lay hidden in the empty quarter. When he went to earth there in the dawn after the finding of Nexué’s body, it was with a certain uneasiness, but he slept dreamlessly in one of the long dormitories, which still retained its roof. He took the time to scratch the Circle of Light and the Circle of Darkness in the dust around him, not knowing whether they would work against a supernatural danger and not knowing what that danger might be. It was only an edge, a possibility—like covering his tracks. Waking with the noon sun glaring through the holes in the roof where, over the years, storms had blown tiles loose, he saw a camel-spider the size of his out-spread hand trundle determinedly over the uneven curves of the dirt-covered floor, stop at the edge of the outer Circle, then skirt it as if it were a pool of water.
During the day, Sun Wolf remained indoors and under cover. Too many windows and battlements of the Fortress overlooked the sprawl of those decaying walls. In his heart, he did not really fear Osgard’s threat to have him crucified if he ever showed his face in Tandieras again...but that was Osgard sane.
Someone had cut Nexué to pieces, and Sun Wolf was not about to make the mistake of thinking that drunken yelling was all the King might do in his rage.
When darkness fell, he moved out of the few roofed buildings and looked for tracks. Even in a desert climate, adobe structures decayed very rapidly once they lost their roofs; the maze of the empty quarter consisted of many walls only a few feet high as well as cells, chambers, and dormitories, whose roofs had but recently fallen but still retained their semblance of being rooms. Drifts of sand, gravel, and broken roof tiles lay everywhere, stitched with tracks: the ladderlike marks of sidewinders, the feathering of lizard tracks, light bird prints like the ancient shirdar runes he had seen carved in the butter-colored sandstone of Wenshar. The adobe walls were five feet thick and more—it was easily possible for a human killer to have run along the tops of them, leaving no marks on the sand below. But nowhere around the blood-splattered dyer’s workshop did he find signs of a man’s weight having passed along the top of the walls.
Like the foxes that slept in their holes all day, Sun Wolf prowled the maze of shadows in the checkered moonlight. In the northern courtyards he sensed a trace of magic, the uneasy scent of spells in the darkness. As he had when scouting beneath the walls of an enemy city, he sank close to the ground, putting himself below a standing man’s line of sight, aware that the indigo velvet of the shadows would be no concealment from mageborn eyes. He followed the magic, like a thread of perfume. Oddly, he sensed no danger, but a moment later saw a scorpion, barbed tail held high, veer suddenly out of its way and go scurrying off in another direction. He remembered again how the birds had fallen silent the morning he had found the dead doves.
Cautiously, he slipped forward; as he looked over the sill of a decapitated wall, he heard a woman moan.
The man and woman in the cell beyond lay twined together, the moonlight that poured through the broken roof covering their legs from the thighs down like a cast-back silken sheet. Where it struck the clothes on which they lay, Sun Wolf could see the glitter of bullion embroidery against black homespun, the tabard written over with the holy runes of the Trinitarians. In the shadows, his wizard’s sight picked out the soft surge of the full breast and the young man’s arm, white as the body of the woman he clasped. Gold hair tumbled, mingling with unraveling coils of smoky red.
It was none of his business, he knew, as he moved back with all the silence of those hundreds of night-scout missions. But it did occur to him to wonder whether, after all her talk of purity, Kaletha had ever seen Nexué spying on her here.
For Starhawk it was an interesting time. She had always enjoyed watching people, taking a deep and satisfied delight in seeing her friends behave exactly like themselves, whether for good or ill. She had always done this, and it had never earned her popularity. Neither her brothers and their sweethearts, the nuns in the Convent of St. Cherybi where she had grown up, nor the other mercenaries of Sun Wolf’s troop had felt particularly comfortable under the nonjudgmental gaze of those calm gray eyes. Perhaps this was because, as an outsider, she was frequently amused by what was going on and, often at the same time, felt deep and genuine concern.
In two days of quietly standing guard and attending Kaletha’s lectures in the gardens of Pardle Sho, she sometimes had the impression of lying on the bank of a water hole, watching from a blind as the animals came down to drink.
Tazey remained in her bed, for the most part only lying and looking at the ceiling, though occasionally she wept. It had cost Starhawk little to leave her family and enter the convent, but she still remembered with agonizing clarity the single long night she had spent trying to decide whether to remain there quietly among women she had known all of her short life or to follow the dark and violent path of a man she had spoken to only once, a man who had touched off in her soul a powder keg of longings which, in her heart, she knew could never again be quenched. Her greatest fear, she remembered, had been that she would turn into someone she did not want to be—someone she would not even want to know. But she had known, from the first moment she understood that Sun Wolf would admit her into his troop, that there was no way back. She would either go, or know forever that she had not gone.
Whatever lay beyond the silent wall that guarded the future, Starhawk’s heart ached for the girl and her lonely choice.
It would help, she thought with impersonal anger, if they would simply leave Tazey alone. But of course they did not. Her father came, sober, grave, his sweat smelling of last night’s liquor in the dense heat of morning, and talked gently to her, calling her his little girl. Tazey agreed with what he asked her but when she was alone, she wept hopelessly for hours. The Bishop Galdron put in his appearance, too, speaking in measured, mellifluous tones about the Nine Hells and predestined choices. Starhawk, meeting him on the stairs coming down from the balcony of the Household, informed him that if he ever spoke so to Tazey again she would personally slit his nostrils.
“The man is a bigot and a hypocrite,” Kaletha said primly, folding her hands amid the jagged sun-splashes that fell through the arbor onto her black homespun knees. “He cannot possibly sincerely believe that the use of one’s wizardry automatically condemns one to eternal damnation. But even so, a threat of physical violence, however much you may not have meant it, reflects badly on us all.”
Starhawk shrugged. “If I were a wizard, or even wanted to be a wizard,” she said evenly, “you might have a point—always supposing I accepted your right to judge my conduct.” Kaletha started a little, but hastily got her first reaction in hand and did her best not to show her surprise that anyone in her company would not automatically accept her dictates. In her more human moments, Starhawk thought obliquely, Kaletha has the grace to realize the hubris of that assumption. Around them, the public gardens o
f Pardle Sho were somnolent under the heat; its few spiky cacti and dark boulders, which were all that graced this particular high court, reminded her for some reason of the Wolf.
Starhawk went on, “And yes, I did mean it. Tazey has to make her own choice in this. Whether she decides to turn her back on her father and a potential husband or hurt for the rest of her life pretending that sandstorm never happened, it’s her own choice, and Galdron has no business waving Hell under her nose. Either way, she’s going to have enough hurting to do as it is.”
“The man is a boor...” Anshebbeth began, looking up from a meditation upon which she had clearly not been concentrating.
“No,” Kaletha corrected. “He’s very civilized—it’s what makes him dangerous.”
“It makes him believable, at any rate,” Egaldus added thoughtfully. He was seated on the granite bench in the latticed shade beside Kaletha; the bench was only large enough to seat two comfortably, but Anshebbeth had crowded onto the end of it under the pretext of needing to speak to Kaletha and had gone into her meditation there rather than moving to another bench. It automatically included her in any conversation, and Starhawk, having watched her find reasons to follow Kaletha from where they had formerly been sitting, guessed that changing seats again probably would not shake her.
The young novice’s face settled into a curiously adult line as he went on, “My Lord Bishop has the gift of always having a plausible answer, always having some alternative possibility. You know he’s coming up to the Fortress tonight, with a scheme for sending Tazey to an outlying nunnery in the foothills near Farkash on the coast. Disinheriting her, in effect, but also exiling her.”
Kaletha’s face flushed with anger. “He can’t! In any case, sending her away from any possibility of being properly taught won’t make her any the less mageborn!”
“No,” Egaldus said drily. He stood up, the sunlight tipping the thick masses of his fair hair like a soft, sparkling halo around his face. “But it seems to be Galdron’s current panacea.” His blue eyes looked gravely down into those of the woman before him, and he sighed. “He’s talking about doing it to me as well.”
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