The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  “I would have thought so,” the Wolf said, after a moment’s consideration. “But most of those buildings are pretty unprotected. The ones with the roofs off are decaying badly already. And people go there sometimes, looking for lost chickens or a quiet place to fornicate...” Oh, well, he thought a half second later, as the dark eyes flicked up to him and then away, suddenly a boy’s again and startled to hear a grownup just come out and say it. “I don’t think she’d risk it.”

  “There are cellars under the empty quarter, you know,” Jeryn said after a moment. “Cut down into the rock, some of them. They used to store grain and things down there during the season of storms, back when this was the Fortress and they were under siege all the time. Most of ’em are real dirty,” he added fastidiously, and went back to perusing the cramped columns of book hand before them.

  “Black Book of Wenshar?” Sun Wolf squinted down at the unfamiliar handwriting. “Sounds promising.”

  “They only call it that because it’s got a black cover,” Jeryn supplied. “It’s a big book with the family trees of the Ancient House of Wenshar, one of the books Mother brought with her in her dowry. It says here, ‘Writ in the shirdane.’”

  “Well, that won’t do us much good.”

  “Oh, I can read the shirdane,” said Jeryn. “Kaletha taught me, back before she became a wizard and started teaching magic. Later some of the scribes helped me. That book there...” He pointed to the little black-bound volume Sun Wolf had set down, ruinously old with its crumbling pages in slanting, flowing characters, their ink faded almost to nothing, “It starts out...” He opened it, studied the last page for a moment, then explained, “The shirdar do their books wrong way ’round. This says, A Treatise on the Use of Cactus and...and...” He struggled with the word, then said, “I don’t know this one. Cactus and something, anyway, in Healing.”

  “Aloe, probably,” Sun Wolf guessed, looking down at the boy with a kind of admiration. “Does your father know you read this?”

  Jeryn fell silent at the mention of his father. After a long moment he said, “I don’t think so. I told him I could, once, and he—he said I shouldn’t waste my time.”

  Sun Wolf stared to say, A man who spends twelve hours a day pickling himself in brandy has a lot of room to talk about wasting time, but shut his mouth on the words. The boy had enough troubles without being reminded of what was undoubtedly as great a shame to him as his bookishness was a shame to his father. Instead he simply said, “Well, I’m telling you it’s not a waste of time—not in a King who’s going to have to deal with the shirdar all his life. Was this part of your mother’s dowry?”

  “I think so,” said Jeryn, turning the small volume thoughtfully over in his hands. “She brought a lot of books, and some of them were pretty old.”

  Sun Wolf scanned rapidly down the list before him. “This one isn’t listed here, though—not in your mother’s things.”

  “That’s funny,” said Jeryn. “Because I thought all the shirdane books were Mother’s. In fact, I know they were, because it doesn’t say anywhere else that they’re in that language.”

  “So there are books here that weren’t listed.” Sun Wolf weighed the alien herbary in his hand, remembering something Starhawk had told him Tazey had said, an idea slowly taking shape in his mind. “Where are the others in the shirdane?”

  Jeryn hurried back out to the larger room, to one of the cabinets which still retained its door. As he unlatched and swung it open, he said, “They keep them all together, because nobody can read them except a couple of clerks.”

  Some were almost new, others ancient and filthy, their leather covers blackened with smoke and dust and the oily grip of hands long turned to clay. Sun Wolf counted them—there were twenty-five. “And there were only seventeen on your mother’s dowry list.” He turned back to the boy, his single eye glinting in the hazy gleam of evening sunlight that diffused through the half-closed shutters. Reaching up, he took one of the oldest looking and balanced it on the edge of a shelf for the boy to look at.

  “The Book of the Surgeon,” Jeryn read out the scrolled, faded symbols laboriously. “Oh, look, there’s a skeleton!” he added eagerly, opening a few leaves in.

  “And not a very good one,” Sun Wolf added, gazing down over his shoulder. “His elbow bends the wrong way—look. I don’t remember this on the list, either.”

  Jeryn shook his head, puzzled.

  “Is there an inventory of things that were here when the Fortress was taken over during the rebellion?”

  “There should be,” Jeryn said slowly. “I mean, if I were a rebel captain and took over an enemy fortress, I’d want a list of what was there so I’d know how to use it against the enemy.”

  By the time they located it, the sun had long since sunk behind the mountains; all three still, dust-smelling rooms had gone pitch dark, and both searchers were smutched from head to foot with the stirred grime of ages. Sun Wolf was objectively conscious that he was both tired and hungry. In the furor over Milkom’s and the Bishop’s deaths, Osgard had not had time to order the Wolf from the Fortress, but he’d missed breakfast and wasn’t sure if his welcome would hold for dinner—always provided there was anything left by the time he and Jeryn got down to the Hall. But all weariness faded beneath an unaccustomed, scholarly elation as he and Jeryn sat cross-legged on the book-scattered floor, surrounded by the blue-white pool of magelight that illuminated the crackling pages of the old ledger that rested on Sun Wolf’s knees.

  “Here it is.” His hand cast wavering cobalt shadows over the faded page as he pointed. “Thirty volumes of accompts, six large skins for the working of covers and forty skins of parchment...dried ink...ink pots...twenty-six Books of the Witches of Wenshar. I thought as much, when Kaletha talked about the summoning of the dead.”

  “Twenty-six,” Jeryn said, his small hand resting lightly on Sun Wolf’s shoulder as he looked around his arm at the page. “And if Mother brought seventeen,” he said, “and there’s twenty-five there now...”

  “That means that somewhere in this Fortress are eighteen books,” Sun Wolf said, his voice low and his single eye gazing thoughtfully into the darkness, “written by the Witches of Wenshar.”

  Chapter 10

  DARKNESS LAY OVER the Fortress of Tandieras; hiding in corners from the yellow torchlight in the Hall, but walking, alive and sniffing, through the empty quarter. Pale starlight rimmed the broken tiles of the old weavers’ courtyard with frost, but did not touch the sable blackness inside the long building there. By the wavering sulfur glow of the requisite seven bowls of fire, Kaletha gathered her followers for the summoning of the dead.

  Clear and silvery, her voice lifted in the invocation to the Mother. “We ask her aid, having done all that we can...We have purified ourselves with fasting...We have cleansed this room with fire and herbs and water...”

  Standing between Anshebbeth and young Pradborn Dyer, Starhawk flexed her aching hands. She hadn’t swept floors since her convent days.

  “...We have circled ourselves with Darkness and with Light...”

  A spurt of gold flame from one of the bowls made the deep-scratched lines of the pentacle seem to bend and lengthen. It sprawled over the earthen floor like a dead bird; the smell of the dry ground where it had been cut mingled with that of the adobe walls, of must and crushed herbs, of the cloying incense, and the electric dustiness of the wind. A gust groaned through the walls of the empty quarter which lay just beyond the court, making the flames shudder; Starhawk could not repress a quick glance over her shoulder, to the darkness that seemed to wait just outside.

  Wreathed in smoke and incense, Kaletha moved from point to point of the pentacle, taking care never to step across its lines. She touched, in turn, the water in the dishes at its valleys and passed her hands above the bowls of fire; the shadows of her fingers caressed the faces of those who stood in the narrow zone between the inner pentacle and the outer Circle of Light.

  “We have drawn the Circle
of Light about us, to ward off all creatures of darkness; we stand before you defended against all that would do us harm...”

  Except ourselves, thought Starhawk, as the cold hands of those on either side shut around hers. Except ourselves.

  “I don’t like it,” the Chief had said, when she’d spoken to him earlier that evening down in the Hall.

  She hadn’t asked, ‘Why not?’ If he had anything to go on but his animal instinct for danger he would have said as much. Instead she had asked, “How dangerous can it be?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how powerful Kaletha is or what kind of magic she’s learned from those books of hers. I don’t know how much power she’ll be able to raise from those of her following who have power of their own—Egaldus and Shelaina.” This had been a few hours ago, when Starhawk had come down to the Hall and found Sun Wolf and Jeryn devouring a belated dinner of fried cheese and porridge. Their hair and faces glistened from what looked like a hasty wash in the nearest horse trough, and their shirts and doublets were gray with old dust and cobwebs. “According to everything I’ve heard from Tazey and Nanciormis, the power of the Witches of Wenshar was just about always used for evil. It wasn’t a question of some of them being good and some of them evil—they were all a bad lot, no matter how good they were to start with.”

  When Starhawk looked doubtful of that, Jeryn put in, “It’s true.” The branch of candles, used at supper and relighted by the errant pair as they’d come from their mysterious investigations in the library, shone in his dark eyes as he looked up at her. “It’s why Tazey was so scared—why Father’s so angry, too. It isn’t just that Tazey didn’t want to turn into a witch and be damned. She didn’t want to turn into someone who’d deserve to be damned. And they did.”

  The supper things had long since been cleared away, and the folk who remained in the lower end of the Hall, sewing or mending harnesses or sharpening weapons, talked in muffled tones. Beneath the door of the solar, a thread of light was visible. For a time, Osgard’s pacing shadow had crossed it, back and forth, back and forth, as if he imagined he could outwalk pain and loss. Some time ago this had ceased. Now there was only the muted clink of a solitary wine cup on the little bronze table.

  Starhawk had frowned, her gaze going from the big, lion-colored barbarian with his eye patch and his scarred forearms under their tangle of sun-bleached hair, the brass of his grimy doublet winking softly in the candlelight, to the fragile boy beside him, his black curls mussed and usual shabby primness thrown to the winds. “Is that possible?” she’d asked. “For magic to be intrinsically evil?”

  “It shouldn’t be,” the Wolf had said. “But then, by all rights, it shouldn’t work at all. But it does. We still don’t know why magic works, Hawk, any more than we know what lightning is or what life is, for that matter—why a woman should be able to bring another human being alive out of her belly, a person who never existed before and who could raise empires and ride the wind...Why women?”

  “They’re smarter,” Starhawk replied promptly and with a straight face.

  The Wolf had grinned back—it was an old jest between them. Then he’d sobered and said, “We don’t have to understand a thing, or even believe in it, to be killed by it, Hawk. And after going for years believing magic had nothing to do with me, I’m not about to start thinking I understand it. I don’t think magic should—or could—automatically corrupt those who wield it; but on the other hand, there’s a certain amount of unreliable evidence that in this case it did. And in any event, I’ve been warned against necromancy before. Kaletha may not need to intend evil for evil to come of it.”

  “She needs seven,” the Hawk had said slowly, propping her boot on the bench beside him, her elbow on her thigh. “I’m the only other person she trusts. And in an odd way—I don’t exactly trust her, because she’s irresponsible with her power and with her influence over other people. But...in a way I understand her.”

  He had looked up at her for a moment from his half-devoured meal, puzzled, as if he had not quite expected her to form a friendship or a liking where he had none. Not that it was against his will or even his expectations—merely, that he had not thought about the possibility since they had become lovers.

  Finally he’d asked, “Pox rot it, Hawk, don’t you feel it?”

  “I feel there’s danger, yes,” she’d said. “But I also think one or the other of us should be there. And if she’s going to call power out of whichever of us it is, it should probably be me because I don’t have any.”

  He had nodded, accepting her logic. But the sense of danger came back to her now, a nervous prickle; a warrior’s indefinable awareness that the situation, for reasons she could not precisely define, stank like carrion. She had spent the hours between her talk with Sun Wolf and the approach to midnight meditating, and perhaps it was for this reason the night around her seemed alive, and the darkness filled with half-coalesced entities, waiting only to be named.

  She was the only one in the Circle who neither was nor wished she had been mageborn. As they joined hands and Kaletha formed the final link in the glowing ring of human energy between Circle and pentagram, she looked at the faces of those around her: Luatha, her fat face creased in concentration, which did not quite eradicate the lines of sullen discontent around her mouth; Shelaina, wraith-like and withdrawn, looking at Kaletha with her face transfigured by the half-trance in which, under Kaletha’s guidance, she could light fires from cold wood; and Pradborn, his eyes tight shut and his lips moving as he muttered to himself one of Kaletha’s spells of self-hypnosis. Beside her, Starhawk was aware of Anshebbeth, her whole thin body tense as the fist of a frightened amateur around a knife hilt, her face a white mask with its sleepless, dark-circled eyes. Through her palms, clasping Anshebbeth’s long, cold finger bones and Pradborn’s chubby flipper, she felt the stir of power, an almost palpable crosscurrent of moving energy, different from the deepening stillness of the Invisible Circle in which the nuns of St. Cherybi had meditated. Or perhaps, the practical part of her mind said, it was only her knowledge of the tensions which divided that little band.

  At Kaletha’s signal, Egaldus’ musical tenor rose to lead the chanting. The words were unfamiliar to Starhawk except for one earlier rehearsal, an ancient invocation whose hypnotic sonority numbed the mind. Kaletha’s eyes were shut. Outside, the wind muttered distant rumors of storm.

  We are children of Earth, thought Starhawk, her mind beginning to sink under the drone of the voices and of her own participation in the archaic ritual, her thoughts slipping down beneath the weight of the incense toward the point at which they would be completely stilled. Deny it though the Trinitarians might, our minds are born of our bodies, clay informed by living fire; from this comes the power of what we are, not what we do.

  As her mind blended with the chant and the drug-like sweetness of the smoke, the part of her that remained a warrior tingled like a cat at sunset with the sense of power growing in the darkness beyond the protective Circle of Light.

  By starlight, the empty quarter of the Palace had the disjointed appearance of a beast’s skeleton, rib and femur and tibia tracing where the walls had lain, amid a scattering of random vertebrae. The fragile whiteness picked out bleached edges and corners of wall and stone and the silken curve of miniature dunes whose crests frayed in the searching wind. Shadow swathed empty doors and windows and filled the mouths of a hundred courts and alleyways like black curtains of cobweb. The air was livid with electricity and the sulfur stench of power.

  If he struck flint, Sun Wolf thought, standing in the sand-strewn court just inside the gate, the ether itself would explode.

  Methodically, he began to quarter the ruins.

  He carried no light, nor did he summon the fox fire of the mages, not wanting to confuse his eyes with what they saw in light and shadow. He was aware that it would be difficult in any case to see what he sought. Kaletha would have concealed the place from the casual eye, casting spells around the entrance
to the cellar—if cellar it was—that would cause the glance to slip over the place, as it habitually slipped over so many things in common life. From his experience scouting and using scouts, Sun Wolf was well aware how few people could name every item in a room or tell whether a door opened outward or inward; most people, if asked, would be surprised to learn of the door. He had learned also how easy were the spells to make this happen.

  So he walked through the empty courts carefully, marking with a little scribble of light each empty doorway through which he passed—temporary marks, which would fade with the sunlight and be gone. He counted on his fingers the four corners of every roofless cell he entered—old workshops with desiccated shards of benches tumbled where the sandstorms had left them along the walls, their corners deep in sand and shattered roof tiles, the dark rafters overhead murmuring with the voices of sleeping doves; what had once been kitchens, with foxes’ messes in their round little fireplaces; and roofless stables and byres filled with a whispering harlequin of shadow and the furtive scurry of nervous desert rats. The ones farther in had roof beams fallen down across them; nearer the inhabited portions of the Fortress, the beams, scarce in that treeless country, had been taken away. Even in the rare rains of the foothill winters, the thick walls, five and six feet wide at the base, were beginning to melt to shapeless lines of mud.

  He made himself walk to every corner and touch the drifted mats of wood chips and sand there, knowing how illusions could make him think he had seen each shadowed corner look like every other. He knew that it was in the minute and singular checking of every detail that good siegecraft and good generalship—and, incidentally, good magic—lay, so only those with a certain methodical patience could master them.

  Yet through it all, he was conscious of the magic moving in the night. The air seemed to grit upon his skin, as if all his body were a raw wound; the magic-laden silences picked and chewed at his taut nerves until even the sliding of his long hair over his scalp in the movement of hot, restless desert winds was enough to make him start. He could sense Kaletha and her disciples raising power from the bones of the earth, calling it forth from the ambient air; he knew that his own magic partook of it, drawing strength from the strength that walked free and restless in the darkness. He had visited the dyer’s workshop with its shallow, crumbling vat pits, where Nexué’s body had been found the day after her murder. But now, when he walked its four corners again, looking with particular care at the hideously stained stones of its fallen walls, he could feel the echoes of the malice and horror that had been enacted there still lingering in the ground. The bass strings of a harp will speak if the wind passes across them; so crumbling ghosts of magic vibrated around him there as he passed, a shadowless shadow in the night. In another place he felt it again, like a weak afterwhisper of sound. It took him a few moments of gazing at the black stripes of rafters overhead against a blacker sky to realize that it had been in this cell that he had found the massacred doves.