The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  “I see ’em.”

  “...and two for thirty-one...” She moved the peg neatly around the cribbage board in the flickering ochre firelight.

  Sun Wolf grumbled again, “Damn Mother worshipper.”

  It was growing late, but few people had left the Hall. The storm still howled around the walls; the hot air was thick with dust and electricity and heavy with the unventilated stinks of torch smoke, cooking, and stale sweat. Underservants had taken up the trestle tables, but at least half of those who had eaten supper were still there. Now and then their voices would rise, sharp and angry, as the crackling air shortened tempers and made speech careless. Then silence would fall again as they all realized once more their unwillingness to leave, and the wind would moan among the rafters like the grieving damned.

  It would be a long way, Sun Wolf reflected, down those dark corridors to rooms where they’d lie alone, listening to that wind and wondering whether Nexué and Egaldus had seen anything of their killer before they died. Even the lower servants and guards, whose dormitories opened off the main Hall, clustered still around the hazy pools of muddy torchlight, perfectly prepared to wait out the storm. Contrary to custom, the doors of both the Men’s Hall and the Women’s stood open. Upper servants—the chief cook, the dancing master, musicians, and clerks—who had their own chambers, nodded sleepily over games of cards and backgammon; the chief scribe was curled up, unabashedly asleep in a gloomy corner.

  Sun Wolf stared moodily out past his unsatisfactory collection of fives, sixes, and unmatched royalty, wondering if it was the same in those halls on the fringes of the empty quarter which had been given over to Incarsyn and his retinue. He’d sized them up when he’d been taken through to Illyra’s quarters and knew them as hardened warriors who feared neither man nor the desert’s cruelty.

  But this was different, this death which could be neither fought nor fled. The demons of Wenshar returned to his mind, the moony, phosphorescent forms that had flicked in the corner of his vision in the silence of the empty quarter, and the way those cold, glowing shapes had clustered during the storm, thick as bees at swarming time, beneath the windows of the temple in Wenshar.

  He wondered where Kaletha was and exactly when in the confusion she had slipped from the Hall.

  Starhawk was looking inquiringly at him over her flat-folded hand of cards, the slight crease of pain more marked on her forehead. He laid his own cards down quietly. “I’m going out to have a look around. The storm’s fading,” he added, as she started to protest. “The heart of it’s off south, anyway.”

  “Be careful.” She said it casually, but in her eyes he saw she didn’t mean the storm.

  He shook his head. “I feel—I don’t know. I don’t sense any danger—not like last night. In any case, it’s not midnight yet, or anywhere near. The other attacks were all between midnight and dawn. I won’t be long.”

  “I seem to remember hunting you for two or three months after the last time you said that,” Starhawk remarked, collecting the cards and shuffling them competently. “But have it your own way.” She was laying out a hand of solitaire as, cloaked in shadow and illusion, he drifted for the vestibule.

  The wind nearly jerked the great outer door from his hands as he opened it a crack to slip through. Outside, the bulk of the Hold and the courts and walkways around it offered him some protection; but even so, the force of the gale made him stagger. Like a man fighting to wade through a riptide, he thrashed his way to the pillars of the colonnade and, wrapping his arms around the nearest one, held his body tight against it. Sand-laden wind clawed his long hair back from his face and ripped at his skin with talons of gravel. The hot dust clogged his nostrils and the electricity in the air throbbed in his brain.

  He could sense the moon riding high over the roiling wall of dust and chaos. With his eye squeezed shut against the savagery of the storm, he let his soul dip toward the silence of meditation, listening—seeking the Invisible Circle in which he would be free to walk everywhere in the tempest-torn citadel.

  Slowly he became aware of the various currents of the searing wind streaming like water around the towers, of the weight of stone and tile on the balanced stars and chevrons of the roof beams, of nightlamp shadows beneath them, and of the open eyes of two royal children staring awake at the raving darkness. He felt the lightning flare off the Cathedral’s dry, glittering spikes and die between the Binnig Rock and Mount Morian. He sensed how the hurricane savagery ripped and swirled around the walls in the empty quarter. Sand was scouring the broken tiles of the floor, the dust was burying the smells of decaying blood there, the snakes in their holes were dreaming of ophidian hates, and the doves in their crannies were dreaming of nameless, walking fear...

  Above the wind, he heard a scream.

  The sound wrenched him from his contemplation. Even as it did so, his sense of it was lost, swallowed up in the demented fury of the winds. His warrior’s instinct told him to rush back at once to the Hall for help—the wizard in him forced him back into the silence of his meditation, casting through the wind-scoured halls for the direction of the sound.

  Another scream and another, above him and to his right. The balcony of the Household.

  He swung around and ran for the Hall door.

  As he fought it open, he heard the scream as men would hear it, surging in terror over the howling of the fading storm, directionless, from nowhere, terrifying in its uncertainty. Rising like an echo behind it, he thought he heard a second scream of horror and despair; but with the wind hammering in his ears as he heaved the door to, he could not tell. By the time he crossed the vestibule, Starhawk, sword in hand and a dozen scared servants at her back, was halfway up the interior stairs.

  The little hall that ran behind the upper rooms of the Household was a vortex of winds. He flung a glowing ball of blue light before him, and it showed him all the doors tight shut. He was aware of others clambering up the narrow flight behind him: Osgard, in night clothes stinking of stale wine and vomit; two guards, ashen-faced with fear; the chief cook with a cleaver; and Incarsyn, naked under a silken bedgown, sword in hand. A door jerked open near him, and Anshebbeth ran out, fully dressed, her black eyes wide with horror, clutching the black billows of her skirts. She gasped, “On the balcony! I heard...”

  Sun Wolf leaned into the wind as he plunged through her room and out through the open shutters to the darkness and storm.

  Up on the long balcony, the violence of the storm was terrific. Had it not been for the crenelations of the wall, the Wolf would have been swept from his feet; but feeling himself skid under the sweep of the powerful blast that scoured the south wall, he dropped to his knees and grabbed for the stone of the wall. After a moment, he put forth his strength against it, turning the main force of the blast enough to struggle to his feet. The dust in the air threw back most of the witchlight, but he could make out which of the archway shutters had been forced open from within. The great inner curtain flapped like a torn sail in the slip stream. Staggering to the parapet, he looked down.

  The dark, irregular lump of a body could just be made out, huddled at the foot of the wall. Eddies of the storm, broken by the courtyard walls, rippled at the dark sprawl of bloodied robes and stirred the black, half-unraveled braids of the jeweled hair.

  “Did you see it clearly?” Osgard handed Nanciormis a cup of wine.

  The commander hesitated for a long moment, dark eyes traveling from Osgard’s face to Sun Wolf’s. Then he shook his head and gasped as Kaletha rinsed down the abraded wound in his arm with a scouring concoction of wine and marigolds. “But believe me, I didn’t stay for a close look.”

  Sun Wolf folded his arms and leaned his back against the tiled mantel of the solar. The last, spent whispers of the storm were dying down. In the silence, Anshebbeth’s sobbing was jarringly loud. When they had carried the unconscious Nanciormis inside, she had collapsed into hysterical screams. Kaletha, appearing out of nowhere, her carnelian hair streaming disheveled down h
er back, had struck her disciple across the face and cursed her, from jealousy or impatience or merely the burn of the storm along her overstretched nerves. Ignored and hurt, the governess now whimpered wretchedly in a corner.

  While Kaletha was ascertaining that Nanciormis was in fact still alive—due to his falling first to the roof of a small colonnade and only from there to the ground in the shelter of the wall—Sun Wolf and Starhawk had run lightly back up the inner stairs and along the narrow corridor to Nanciormis’ room. Not surprisingly, they had found nothing there. A chair had been overset, and the jointed bronze table thrust violently aside. An open book sprawled on the floor. Sun Wolf picked it up; it was a treatise on falconry. Against the stone wall, a burned patch and a ring of amber shards showed where the lamp had been hurled, the flame killed almost at once by the dust-laden violence of the wind. Dust and debris were everywhere, from when the shutters had been opened. Sun Wolf had closed and locked the door behind him, and only Starhawk’s presence at his side had prevented him from glancing repeatedly back over his shoulder at the darkness until they were in the torchlight of the solar once again.

  “I don’t know what made me look up,” Nanciormis was saying quietly. “I couldn’t sleep, though, on the whole, storms don’t bother me. But there was something—some sense of evil in that room...”

  He glanced quickly up at Sun Wolf again and then at Kaletha, silently tidying up her poultices and dressings. A frown creased his brow.

  “What is it?” the Wolf asked, and Nanciormis looked quickly away.

  “Nothing,” he lied. Even having his heels sniffed by death didn’t seem to have shaken his sangfroid. He looked pallid and bruised from his plunge over the parapet; but in the frame of his half-unraveled braids and dusty, open shirt collar, his fleshy face had already regained its usual sardonic lines.

  Incarsyn, standing beside Osgard, his unbraided hair hanging like a woman’s to his waist and their earlier quarrel passed over now in this crisis, asked softly, “Did it speak?”

  The commander looked up at him, his dark eyes half puzzled, as if searching for the right words for a memory of terror and chaos. “I—I don’t exactly know. I think...” He passed a hand over his mouth. “It—when it moved toward me I realized—I knew I was in danger but it was like a nightmare. But when it moved I flung the lamp at it...” He hesitated, glanced at Sun Wolf again, then away. Having seen Nanciormis’ slowness to react to Osgard’s drunken attack on Incarsyn, Sun Wolf was a little surprised that the commander had gotten away at all and mentally noted that whatever it was—spell, demon, djinn—evidently it did give sufficient warning to escape, if there was anywhere to escape to.

  Anshebbeth, rocking back and forth, covered her eyes with her hands and whispered, “Oh, dear Mother...”

  “Anshebbeth, shut up!” Kaletha’s voice cracked. Sun Wolf observed with interest that, although Nanciormis had quickly recovered, Kaletha’s hands were shaking uncontrollably. She dropped the scissors and picked them up again, her eyes downcast.

  “How did you know what to do?” Osgard poured himself another cup of wine, but it was only an automatic gesture; his face was pale with shock, and he looked cold sober and ill.

  “The last scion of the Ancient House of Wenshar,” Incarsyn said softly, “would know.”

  Kaletha glanced sharply at Nanciormis, who only shook his head. “I—I don’t know, exactly.” He pulled up his white silk shirt once more over the bandage. Under it, the muscle of his body was still discernible, like rock half-buried in soft mud. “But yes, the stories I had heard said that—that men had escaped the Witches by running out into the storms. They were often killed that way, too, of course; it was only chance that I fell on the sheltered side of the wall.”

  Sun Wolf frowned, sifting this in his mind. He guessed that Nanciormis’ account might not be entirely trusted, yet saw no reason for the commander to lie about his escape. He was, as Incarsyn said, the last scion of the Ancient House. The Wolf wondered what the commander was hiding.

  Osgard wiped his stubbly face. “You’ll sleep the rest of the night here,” he said. “It—it doesn’t seem to strike when people are together...”

  “It struck Galdron and Milkom together,” the Wolf pointed out, leaning one arm along the tiled mantelpiece. “Though it may only have been meant to kill one. But it’s also only happened between midnight and dawn before. Now it’s getting earlier. And we have no guarantee it won’t have a second try. It’s a long way yet till day.”

  Anshebbeth groaned and covered her face with long, skeletal fingers. Kaletha began “Really...” Starhawk, with a glance at her that would have frozen a millpond, went over to rest comforting hands on the governess’ shoulders.

  “I can’t stand this,” Anshebbeth whispered brokenly. “I can’t stand it...”

  “Now, Anshebbeth,” Nanciormis began, looking embarrassed and uneasy at the prospect of another fullblown bout of hysterics. And well he might, Sun Wolf thought sourly. A man might be bedding a woman in secret and still shrink from openly admitting it, particularly a woman as unprestigious as Anshebbeth. For her part, desperately as she might need comfort, the governess clearly knew better than to seek it publicly in his arms. “Perhaps you’d better go back to your room and get some sleep.”

  “No!” ’Shebbeth wailed. “I want to stay here.”

  “It might be better,” Starhawk put in tactfully, “if you stayed with Tazey.” She glanced at the King. “We should probably move Jeryn in there for the rest of the night as well. I’ll keep guard.”

  Anshebbeth looked desperately at Kaletha for comfort, but she, too, was looking the other way, hastily gathering her things to depart. As Sun Wolf followed her more slowly out into the Hall, he heard Nanciormis say to the King, “I think I’d better have a word with you, Osgard...”

  The wind still sobbed in the narrow stair as Sun Wolf ascended. The noise almost masked the slithery swirl of a silk nightdress around the turning above him and the sticky pat of a bare foot on cold stone fleeing into darkness. When he reached Tazey’s room, the lamp flames were still shuddering with the wind of a body’s hasty passage, but the girl lay on her bed, rigid and pretending sleep, her hands pressed over her face.

  Sun Wolf walked the darkness of the empty quarter until dawn. He sensed no evil, no danger there, yet his every instinct of a warrior prickled that there was something amiss. In the shifting sand drifts among the broken walls, he sought for signs of Kaletha’s passing, but found none. That meant nothing—the nervous after-eddies of the storm would have eradicated them. Kaletha had looked shaken to the marrow. Because Nanciormis had seen something she preferred to believe did not exist? Because it was becoming clear that the spells of the Witches of Wenshar, so casually tampered with, might contain things beyond her knowledge or control—might even turn her evil against her will? Or merely because someone had survived an attack?

  Why Nanciormis? As last scion of the Ancient House of Wenshar, he might know things...

  Or was there a why? Sun Wolf was uneasily aware that, as a wizard himself, he, too, might know too much, but he had not been attacked.

  And the cool, detached portion of his mind retorted, Yet.

  The cold stars turned against the black sink of the sky. The night circled toward morning. Blazing with lights against the darkness, the Hold towered above him; behind it, black and silent, loomed the bulk of the Binnig Rock. Standing on a platform of crumbled adobe wall, he spread out his arms and sank into meditation once more, tasting, smelling the night. But there was nothing, save the breathing of the serpents and the dreams of the doves.

  When he returned in the cool yellow brightness of dawn, it was to find Starhawk, Anshebbeth, and Jeryn all deeply asleep, and Tazey’s bed empty.

  A note lay rolled on the pillow.

  It was superscribed, “Father,” but he tore off the pink hair ribbon that bound it. Beside him, Starhawk slumped against the side of the bed, eyes sealed in stuporous sleep—Starhawk, raised to the all-ni
ght watches of convent vigils, who had never been known to sleep on guard duty in her life.

  The note said:

  Father—

  I made Starhawk and ’Shebbeth fall asleep, please don’t be angry with them.

  Incarsyn was right to put me aside. Sun Wolf and Starhawk are right. I am a witch and the Heir to the Witches of Wenshar. It is all my doing—Nexué, and Galdron, and Norbas Milkom, and Egaldus, and Uncle Nanciormis. I know this now and I swear to you, it won’t happen again. Please, please forgive me. And please don’t look for me. Don’t blame anyone—I’m doing this by my own choice. I don’t want to become like the Witches of Wenshar, and I know that’s what would have happened to me.

  I love you, Daddy; please believe that I love you. I never wanted this. I never wanted to be anything but your daughter and to love you. Please just tell Jeryn that I’ve gone away, and that I love him very much. I love you and I’m so very sorry.

  Good-by,

  Tazey

  Chapter 13

  UNDER THE CRUEL BRILLIANCE of the late afternoon sun, Wenshar lay like an elephants’ graveyard of houses that had somehow crept to the base of the blackened cliffs to die. Wind sneered through the crumbled stone walls, unbroken even by the buzz of a rattlesnake; dust devils chased one another like lunatic ghosts. The few portions of houses still boasting roofs watched the two searchers from windows like the dark eyepits of skulls.

  Starhawk’s mare started for no apparent reason, throwing up her head, long ears swinging like leaves in a gale; the woman leaned forward and stroked the sweating neck. But she made no sound.

  Listen as he would, Sun Wolf could hear nothing—no echo from any of those three twisting canyons or the rock mazes beyond.

  But he knew they were there, waiting.

  They had been waiting for him since he had left.

  Wind thrummed in his ears as he turned his horse’s head toward the wide mouth of the central canyon. Starhawk followed without a word; the blue shroud of shadow covered them as they passed the narrow gate of its mouth. In the stifling heat of the canyon, the rocks stank of demons.