Hand knit to hand; flesh to flesh. Starhawk was aware, through the strange sparkling darkness of what was almost like meditation, of the power passing through the meat and sinew from the innermost marrow to the innermost marrow of the knotted bones within. She had never before partaken of this pooling of power, but she could sense the energy moving around the circle, greater than Kaletha’s power, or Egaldus’ fast-growing strength. It seemed to her that the flames that burned over the herbs and the incense had sunk, that shadow moved over the faces of the seven, that the lines scratched in the earth to define the pentacle and the Circle were faintly glowing, and that the faces themselves, which she had known throughout the last ten days, had changed, different and yet not unfamiliar, as if she had always known what they looked like underneath the skin.
She was chanting, repeating over and over the meaningless syllables of the unknown rite, the sound itself washing over her mind like the rhythm of sea waves; she was aware they had all begun to sway with the movement. She had no idea how long they had been chanting, nor did she care; as when she meditated, it seemed to her that time had settled and stopped, and she would have been neither surprised nor upset to walk outside and discover that the stars had not moved at all or that the sun was rising. But in meditation, she was conscious of all things, like the silence of deep water. In this, she was conscious only of the chant, the steady beat of its strength in her mind, and the scarcely controlled power slipping from hand to hand. It was like sleep, but moving sleep. The mind was released, she thought dimly—the mind that lay like a shield over the dark well beneath, from which the power came.
And just before her own mind surrendered to the chanting, she realized why all of the victims had been attacked when they were. But if that’s the case...she thought, and fear hit her as suddenly as if she had stepped off a cliff.
Like the whisper of wind, she heard Kaletha’s voice, though whether inside her skull or outside she could not be sure. “Don’t break the Circle...Don’t pull your mind from the power.
The others were relying on her. For a panicked instant she wanted to release the hands she held, flee to the empty quarter and find the Chief, tell him, warn him...But the disciplines of meditation were strong. She let her thoughts sink back into the nothingness of the chant, and, as if she had opened her hand, the knowledge raveled away into the dry flicker of the night wind.
Sun Wolf put his hand on the loose dune of sand-covered rubble, which dissolved before his eyes into insubstantial shadow. He saw almost at the same moment that his fingers touched it, the iron of the grillework that the spell had concealed, and he jerked his hand away in terror, as if burned. He fell back a step, the muttering dryness of the desert wind making cold the sweat that suddenly stood on his brow, his heart slamming like a smelter’s hammer...
But there was nothing to be afraid of.
His mind told him that, even as his breath raced from his lips. Not even instinct, he thought, no clue, no sign. Just fear itself.
His father’s harsh teachings had managed to make him forget for nearly forty years that he had been mageborn, but it had never quite eradicated his curiosity. The old man had said a hundred times, “You’re too nosey for a warrior, boy,” usually followed up by a clip on the ear. He stepped forward again.
He could see the spell marks now on the iron. That delicate frieze of signs, invisible to the human eye, could only have been written by Kaletha. In the living horror that whispered in every shadow of the night, he still felt fear of them and of this place, a deserted kitchen in the midst of the old quarter; but he was aware now that not only the grille, but the remains of the tiled floor and the crumbling adobe walls, had been written with fear-spells. The power that walked the night picked them up and made them resonate in his mind like the ghastly images of nightmares.
He wiped the sweat from his palms and fished in his doublet pocket for a wax writing tablet and stylus. It was only the spells of the night, he told himself, forcing his hand steady as he copied the signs as well as he could, to study them later. There was no danger...
Or was there?
He clicked the tablet closed and pocketed it once again. Just because his fear was induced by a spell didn’t mean that there was no reason to fear.
Kaletha would be on the lookout for a spell mark near her hideaway, but, at a guess, she had no woodscraft. He marked the corner with three bricks, to find it again in case of some spell that confused the memory of directions, and walked out into the court.
The fear lessened as he stepped beneath the broken door-lintel. Outside, the wind was stronger—not the hard, tearing forerunner of the storms, but the shifting whisper of dry voices, playing tag among the ancient stones, like the demon voices in the canyons of Wenshar. In a corner near a dry well, he found a couple of dusty cottonwood saplings, seeded in a wet year from the old tree in the next court. They were half-dead, and it was no difficult thing to tear one of them up by its shallow roots. His nape prickling like a dog’s at the queer, rising tension of the night, he pulled his knife from his belt and began stripping the sapling into a pole, listening all the while, though for what he did not know.
He wondered if Kaletha would be able to summon the voice of the dead.
More than any artificial spell of hers, laid on this place to keep intruders away, the thought terrified him.
Cautiously, he reentered the darkness of the ruin.
The sapling was nearly seven feet long, brittle as only dry cottonwood could be. He worked its end through the metal of the grille and levered sideways. The metal grated on stone; like the swish of silk on dust, he heard something move sharply in the pitchy darkness underneath.
The iron was heavy, but no earth had settled around it—it was nearly clean of rust. He tipped the grille out of its sunken bed and reached gingerly over to topple it aside. Then he looked down into the hole beneath and felt the skin crawl along his scalp.
The pit below was alive with snakes.
Most of them were the brown-and-gray desert rattlers. When his body bulked dark against the night above them, they set up a dry buzzing as they raised their horned noses skyward. In the darkness, he could see among them the slender lead-colored rock asps and, like gross, flat-headed slugs, the big cave mambas, as long as his arm and half again as fat. Even as he watched, he saw another one slither forth from a hole in the wall of the pit, to fall with a soft, sickening plop to join its brethren. The sandy floor of the cellar below seemed to glitter with black, watching eyes.
They must have been drawn by Kaletha’s spells from all over the empty quarter, he thought, since first I came near the place.
He felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the local attitude toward the Witches of Wenshar.
Well, pox rot you, he thought. Two can play that game.
He hunkered down on the rim of the pit, sapling pole in hand. The vicious buzzing of the rattlers rose again; in the darkness he could make out sinuous movement and the dozenfold flicking of forked, black, questing tongues.
Reaching out with his mind, he felt the prickling of those stupid alien angers, a shortsighted rage to strike at warmth and the smell of blood. Never taking his eye from the snakes, he caressed the Cottonwood pole with his big, sword-scarred hands, as if to work magic into it as he would work a lotion. He imparted his smell to it, the heat of his flesh, and the shadow of his bulk against the night. The darkness all about him seemed charged with power, intensifying in his mind the smell-feel of the reptile instincts below that woke such disturbing echoes in his own thoughts. He could feel the spells that worked on them, that had drawn them there, and that would turn them to attack a man. Those spells, too, he worked and turned into the wood, while taking into his own body the illusion of coldness and stasis and the smell of the ancient stones.
He addressed a brief prayer to such of his ancestors as might be listening and flung the pole down into the corner of the pit below.
It bounced; at the movement, the snakes were upon it, striking again
and again at the spell-written wood. There was absolutely no time to lose and none to think, but it did cross Sun Wolf’s mind, as he lowered himself by his hands and dropped the few feet remaining to the sandy floor of the pit, that it was perfectly possible for him to have gotten the first part of his spells right and muffed the second.
No, he thought. His body bloodless, smelling of stone and dust was cold to the tongues of the snakes. He was a dead thing; it was the pole that was alive and must be killed.
They continued to strike the pole.
The cellar was clean, about a dozen feet square, and low-roofed, smelling of earth and stone and of the dusty fetor of the snakes. The air there was dry and still. No dust drifted its corners—the walls above sheltered its entrance from the prevailing winds. A short ladder lay along one wall, where it could be lowered and dropped from above. In the darkness, Sun Wolf could make out a table, a reading stand, and a tall-legged stool. Beyond them, a niche was cut out of the far wall, a low ceiling beam sheltering a sort of hollow there. Deep inside it he saw two small chests of iron-bound leather, neither of them larger than a woman could carry by herself. There were no lamps. To nonmageborn eyes, even by day, the place would be dim and shadowy, and by night, a Stygian pit.
But even in the darkness, he could see the skittery movement swarming along the lids of the chests.
He threw a quick glance back at the crawling heap of loathsomeness around the pole. His instincts told him that wouldn’t last much longer; it was a fight to keep his concentration on the illusions that kept them attacking the wood and blocked their awareness of the heat of his own veins. He understood then why meditation was so essential, strengthening and freeing the concentration. He knew he could maintain two illusions at once, but never three.
The lids of the chests were crawling with scorpions.
Slow with loathing, his hand went to the pocket of his doublet for his gloves. But even as he did so, movement caught his eye on the overhanging beam and on the earth and stones it carried. He’d have to duck his head under it to reach the chests. Even as he watched, a scorpion dropped down from the beam into the niche—one of the big, shiny brown ones, long as a man’s hand, whose stings could pierce all but the toughest leather. The sweat was cold on his face as he passed his hand nervously across the back of his neck, and he understood then that he couldn’t do it. The boxes were locked. Given time, he could force a lock, but he could not pick up a trunk that size, filled with the weight of books, without crawling halfway under that lintel.
Kaletha had defeated him.
Anger and resentment surged up in him, but the sensible part of him, the strategist that had come more and more to the fore as he grew older, told him not to be stupid. He had been in situations where he would rather have died than admit that a woman had defeated him, but the stupidity of the acts to which he had let himself be driven in that kind of rage had never been worth it. She had power. Though he could feel that his own powers were heightened with the sorcery stirring through the night, something told him not to push his luck.
His hyperquick hearing picked up the stir and swish of movement behind him. Turning, he saw the snakes had finally realized that what they bit was dead wood. For the most part they were still milling, but a mamba as big around as his leg was crawling toward him like a swollen, dirt-colored worm.
Snakes would strike at sudden movement; he glided away from the chests, glancing everywhere and cursing his blindness on his left side. It might have been the heat of his anger at Kaletha that shivered the wall of illusions that covered him, merely the cumulative pressures of maintaining the spells, or the uncanny power that filled the night like hallucinatory flame—he did not know. But other snakes swung their heads toward him, tongues flicking. He flipped the ladder cautiously over with the toe of his boot, and a single scorpion—the small, whitish-gray kind whose sting was no worse than the sting of a bee—darted to safety in a corner. He jerked his foot aside as the mamba struck at his boot heel and he shoved the ladder into position. If he panicked, he knew the spells would crumble. Before the snake could strike again, he was scrambling up out of the pit, to the wind and shadows above.
When he reached the top, his hands were shaking so badly he could barely push the ladder down through the hole again and replace the grille.
“And when was that?” asked Starhawk, her voice quiet in the gloom of the little cell beyond the stables.
Sun Wolf shook his head. They lay together in the makeshift bed of pine poles and faded quilts, flesh against chilled flesh, but neither had moved to make love. Their kisses had been those of comfort against fears and thoughts neither could quite define, and they held each other, not as lovers do, but like brother and sister, frightened of the dark. “I don’t know. I came back here; it was at least an hour before you did.” He moved his head, to look down at the browned, delicate face in its short frame of ivory hair, where it lay on the hard pillow of his pectorals. “Why?”
Her gray eyes seemed transparent in the thin glow of the magelight that burned like a lamp around the tip of one bedpost. “Because I—I’m not sure, but I think that’s when there was a break in the power of the Circle. It’s like—I can’t tell what the Circle was like. Like a tug of war, maybe, or—or rising to the climax of lovemaking. I don’t know. But there can be no break in it, no slacking. The power has to feed on itself.”
Sun Wolf nodded, understanding. “What you may not be strong enough to get from yourself, you can achieve by combining many minds—if you can get those minds to pull together. Yes. But if one stops pulling, they all slack.”
“And they all did,” said Starhawk. “It was like a harness trace breaking, or like falling out of love. Kaletha tried to recover it, but...we never did, completely.”
She moved her weight slightly against him, hard muscle and hard bone, the ridges of scars breaking the silk of the flesh.
He asked, “Did Galdron come?”
Starhawk shook her head and moved again, pressing closer to him under the mottled, sand-colored homespun of the worn quilts. By the witchlight, he could see the deepening of the scratchwork of fine lines around her eyes; through his arm around her body, he felt the tension of her muscles.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head again, and Sun Wolf, sensing not only her fear but his own, drew her tighter yet against him. “The concentration broke, or it never peaked. Nothing. But I could feel it—” She looked around her at the darkness crowding onto the blue witchlight and the velvet night beyond the window, charcoal black and still with the predawn drop of the wind, as if all the world held its breath. “And I feel it still.”
“I know,” the Wolf said softly. “So do I. And I’m wondering why. Power was built up, Hawk—it’s still here, hanging over the empty quarter like a miasma. Something...”
She frowned suddenly, as some word of his tugged at her mind.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Something you said...Something I thought during the summoning...it was important, but damned if I can remember what it was or why. Only...”
Something beyond the windows snagged the corner of his vision. His head whipped around, and the Hawk, feeling the sudden flinch of his muscles, was silent, as he killed the blue glow of the witchlight and they lay together, staring out of darkness into the dark.
There was movement in the empty quarter.
He rolled silently out of bed and walked naked to the window, holding to the velvet density of the shadows around the wall. The air was freezing on his flesh. Like a ghost, Starhawk joined him, the quilt thrown over her shoulder, carrying her sword.
Neither spoke. Around them the power was palpable in the night, the hideous tension that had grown, not lessened, as those who had formed the Circle had sought their beds.
Sun Wolf was not sure, but he thought he saw the bluish flicker of demon light among the labyrinth of skeleton walls.
Silently he turned away and found his boots, war
kilt, and sword. As he pulled them on, Starhawk joined him, locating her own clothing as she had located her weapon by touch in the dark. By the time she was ready, Sun Wolf had gone to the door and was looking out across the little court toward the empty quarter. He was sure of it now. There were demons there.
This is none of my affair, he told himself. But he felt his heart quicken with the same fear he had felt in the carved canyons of Wenshar, a fear unlike—deeper than—a man’s fear of death or harm. Fear of what? the calm, detached portion of his mind wondered impersonally. It has nothing to do with me.
But in a queer way he knew that it did.
His hand tightened around the greasy old hilt of his sword. The Hawk was like an armed shadow behind him as he moved silently across the starlit court.
In the labyrinth of the old courtyards, the presence of the demons was stronger. He could sense them, feel their malice prickle along his skin, and hear their thin, piping voices calling to one another among the stones. Why here? he wondered. Why tonight? Did they follow the smell of power, gravitating to this place for the same reasons that they haunted the ruins of Wenshar? Was that what they wanted of him when they had hovered through those moonless canyon nights outside the window of the rock-cut temple, waiting for him? Was it the revived power of the old Witches that drew them now, like vultures to the stink of dying things?
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