The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  In the half darkness of those silent corridors of rock, he walked along the central canyon to the palace at its end.

  Nothing whispered to him now from the black sockets of empty doors and windows; only silence waited in the eternal dark under the deformed cypresses. In the deepening shadows, the carved facade that stretched across the canyon’s end seemed the color of dried and ancient blood.

  He climbed the steps. Here, alone in the silent city, had the conquerors from over the mountains done more than simply break doors to loot. A double line of crouching statues, lions and leopards it appeared, had guarded the stair. Their heads and forepaws had been deliberately smashed off—not only smashed, but pulverized, for no broken pieces littered the sand-drifted steps. One beast still retained part of a paw. Sun Wolf saw that it had been a woman’s hand.

  There was no question in his mind where in the palace he must go. The small door to the right of the great entry hall beckoned to him, like the mouth of a tomb one sees in nightmares, knowing it for one’s own. He had heard Starhawk’s voice calling to him from its hoarded night. Now there was only silence, save for the faint reverberance of his footfalls and the distant muttering of the canyon winds.

  As a wizard, he could see clearly in the interior darkness of the corridor beyond, but he summoned witchlight anyway. From the faded frescoes on the walls, women’s eyes looked down at him—dark, knowing, amused. A room opened before him, and he stopped on the painted threshold as the stench of the evil there smote him in the face.

  I shouldn’t be here, he thought, as his heart lurched and began to slam heavily into his ribs. I should go away QUICKLY and draw the Circles around myself...

  But it was foolish. If he did that, he would learn nothing, either about Tazey or about that eerie sense that it was him they wanted...

  Wanted for what?

  The room stretched before him. Every foot of its barn-like emptiness lay bare. Under the blue-white radiance of the magelight, it seemed to say, “See? There’s nothing to fear here.” Yet the smell was there, as sharp and terrible to him as the smell of blood.

  His breath fast and light and the instincts of thirty years of war tearing at his guts, he moved slowly into the room.

  At the far end, a door was tucked into one wall, barred shut and ruinously old. Halfway down the long chamber, a stone altar had once stood, but only the stump of it was left. Like the statues outside, it had been violently broken; but forcing himself to step closer, Sun Wolf saw that even those who had done the thing had been too afraid to remain in this room long enough to finish. Fragments of its frieze were still visible. He shuddered and looked away.

  The Lady Illyra had said nothing of the customs of the inner cults of the shirdar Houses, but, without being told, he knew that this room had been their temple. What they had done had been done here.

  In front of the altar a trench, six or seven feet deep, had been cut to the bedrock, though the gravel and debris of decades now littered its floor.

  Here, Sun Wolf thought, hating it, drawn to its lip, almost against his will. Here.

  He knelt and made sure of the strength of the edge. Then he took a deep breath and dropped lightly into the pit.

  As if it had been a well filled with invisible water, he felt the presence of the demons. Through his boot soles he could sense them underfoot, could feel them moving like glowing fish within the rock walls all around. When he knelt to press his palms to the gravel on the floor, his soul cringed from it, as from red-hot iron.

  Through his hands he felt their whispering in his mind, meaningless noises like the guttural murmur of the wind beneath the earth. His understanding flinched from them, holding back, like a lover holding back from some too-intense ecstasy. Then he bent his head, and his long, thinning hair fell forward around his face. He forced himself to relax, to hear.

  As he had suspected, they knew his name.

  It was only a touch; he slammed shut his mind against them and stood up quickly, shaking as if burned. Looking down, he could see a filthy glow rising like ground water through the gravel beneath his boots. He sprang up, caught the rim of the pit, and swung himself up and out. Somehow the magelight all around him had failed, but it seemed now that every fissure in the rock of the temple wall and every twisted shadow of the broken altar glowed with what was not light. Below him he could see them clearly now in the pit, seeping up out of the earth, staring at him with cold and empty wisdom in their eyes.

  He fell back a few paces to the altar, wanting to run but aware in the calm corner of his mind that it was far too late. No Circle he could make would be strong enough now.

  Like the crystal skeletons of ghosts, they drifted into the air above the trench. Gibbous laughter flicked at the edges of his consciousness. It seemed to him he heard in it Kaletha’s scornful voice, his father’s hoarse bellow, and the drink-slurred mumble of Osgard. Other voices threaded through it—the giggling of Altiokis, the Wizard King, and Sheera of Mandrigyn’s caustic laugh. Like black liquid bubbling to the surface from the darkness of his dreams, he felt the old hates, old angers, and past resentments welling up within him at the sound.

  The demons glowed brighter. Their ring around him closed.

  Other things went through his mind, a pestilent ooze dripping from the walls of his thoughts—dark lusts and the memories of women raped in the fury and triumph of sacking a city in the aftermath of battle. Things came back to him, things that he knew he had done, cruel and stupid and bestial—things he had done because in the fighting he had come within kissing distance of death, and his mind had craved power as a dying man’s body craves the water of life. But now he saw these things, not with the horror of what he had done to other human beings, but with an animal’s savor at the taste of blood.

  Looking up, he saw the eyes of the demons all around him. They were yellow, like his own remaining eye.

  They had been cold, but now, as they gathered closer and closer about him, those shrunken, spider limbs glowed with the reflection of warmth. No longer fully transparent, the frail ectoplasm showed pale, bleeding colors, like watered paint filmed on glass. Their mouths opened, and he saw all those ghostly red teeth, as if they had been tearing at living flesh.

  Like sound re-echoing from a thousand hollows of polished bronze, he heard them whisper, Take it. It is yours.

  Power surged like the pulse heat of lust in his flesh—the power to crush and tear, the power to wield the winds. He saw himself smashing Osgard across the face only for the pleasure of watching him cringe; felt the hot desire to take and keep that slut Kaletha’s books, not because he wanted them, but because she did; to have her and cast her away like the cheap trull she was; to bring down a city if he wanted it and have its fat bourgeois snivel to him with offers of gold, of women, of more power—power for its own sake, to warm his blood like brandy—the power of the mageborn.

  He managed to whisper, “No.”

  Those fragile fingers touched him. The hunger for power clutched him, belly and loins and mind, and the demons screamed it back at him a thousandfold. They were starved, and their starvation kindled in his flesh like fire in dry tinder.

  Feed us, they whispered, and we will feed you.

  He cried again, “NO!” And this time his hoarse voice, raucous as the broken caw of a vulture, echoed against the stone roof and down all the painted corridors of darkness. He turned from the broken altar stone and fled back into the darkness of the room, smashing blindly through the inner door, stumbling into the black corridor beyond, with the demons rushing in a glowing mist at his heels, like greedy dogs sniffing at the smell of his fear.

  He sensed them everywhere in the darkness around him. Even as he fled from them, his heart trip-hammering with terror, Sun Wolf kept that cold battle calm that had more than once saved his life. He was aware that he had to turn left and work his way back to the vast entrance hall; and, as he fled through silent chambers and corridors painted with queer, stiff scenes of animal-headed women tearing apart
fawns and rabbits with their hands, he was aware again that he was being herded.

  Voices piped at him from the darkness, voices that blended eerily into those that he knew—Starhawk’s, Tazey’s, Jeryn’s. Other voices whispered and laughed to him from the frescoes of the walls, the Queens and Princesses of the Ancient House of Wenshar jeering down at him, with their bare white breasts and streaming hair, from the painted immortality of the walls. There were other things in the darkness as well—evil that clotted in the corners and filled some hallways like a miasma of blood—but he closed his mind and plunged through, knowing that, above all, he must not be driven into a corner. If it cost his life, he must avoid the touch of those skinny, fleshless fingers and the warmed honey of the demons’ power.

  Gasping, he plunged into open darkness; starlight gleamed between pillars, barely to be seen in the Stygian gloom. The desert night, usually so cold, was treacly warm on his skin, and dust stung his nostrils.

  The storm, he thought, despairing, even as he plunged across the open darkness of the floor. Like a rotten pomegranate spawning flies, the darkness spawned demons around him.

  They rose from the floor before him and materialized from the walls. The colors of their flesh glowed as they drank his fears and were warmed by them. Their teeth tore at his hands and face. In the starlight, as he plunged outside, he saw the black glitter of running blood.

  He had denied them the right to feed upon his power. To them he was now no more than the mare that they had driven over the cliff to feed on its fear and pain.

  They were capable of killing; that much he now knew. The riddle of Wenshar fitted together in his mind with horrible clarity—what it was the women had done in their cult, and how its power had been reawakened. He plunged down the steps, running as he had never run before, with the storm heat of the night burning in his lungs, knowing there was no escape.

  Still he ran, stumbling on the broken roadway in the ghostly shadow of the stone needles and the black cypresses, hearing the faint chitter of their laughter at his heels, and breaking every sinew of his body to buy minutes, seconds...

  He remembered Nanciormis lying in the shelter at the bottom of the wall and Incarsyn saying, “The last scion of the Ancient House of Wenshar would know...”

  His mind reached out and found the storm.

  It came like a stampede of wild horses, apt to the power of the mageborn and greedy to answer his call. He felt its direction, searing out of the west, and knew he had to make open ground. Here in the canyons it would be only an eddy of wind. The demon glow flickered bright in the tail of his eye, and something ripped his arm like a comb of thorns; the muscles of his thighs and knees burned, his chest seemed filled to bursting with hot salt, and the ground a loose carpet of potholes and rolling rocks beneath his pistoning feet.

  The black weight of the storm dinned in his head. He thought of the tearing stones, debris, and choking dust; he thought of what would happen if he missed the shelter of the ruins below the canyon mouths. But Nanciormis had been right to fling himself over the battlement; Tazey had been right; and weirdly, old Galdron, stroking his silky beard in self-satisfied righteousness, had been right. It would be better to die than to do what the Witches of Wenshar had done.

  Now was the only chance he had to escape.

  The demons were waiting for him in the canyon mouth. He bellowed the ancient battle cry of his tribe as he hit the narrow place at a dead run. He felt the teeth of the demons fasten on his neck and jaw, felt claws clinch around his arm and rip through his sleeve and the flesh beneath. They drew on the heat of his blood, and the shock of it was like falling naked into icy water. His knees buckled, but he forced himself not to fall, as he had forced himself in thirty-one years of battle and carnage. The only thing to do was keep running, running into the sand-laced winds...

  Pain shot through his leg, and he went down. Gravel tore at his flesh as he buried his face in his arms. Like razors, teeth ripped his shoulder and raked his back; claws scrabbled at the hand he’d clapped over the nape of his neck. Then hot wind twisted at his hair and clothes and the rage of the storm struck him—searing, tearing, choking.

  He felt the demons loosened from his back, like burrs ripped from a dog’s coat. Almost sobbing with relief, he dragged himself up to one elbow, then to his feet, his legs shaking so badly they could barely obey his will. Windblown debris savaged him, adding to the blood already running down his face and arms. It took all the strength he had left to push the worst of the burning dust aside.

  Like a blind and wounded animal, he began to crawl toward the shelter of the ruined walls of Wenshar.

  The sun woke him, and the pain of his stiffening wounds. He rolled over, aching; sand and debris slithered grittily from his legs, which lay partly outside the shelter of the half-collapsed brick kiln into which he had dragged himself. He looked down at his hands; blood and filth clotted the semicircular tears in the flesh. His whole body hurt. He had remained conscious long enough to twist the worst of the baking shroud of dust from him, but he still felt parched with thirst, feverish, and strange.

  He crawled out of his shelter, blinking in the brightness. When he stood up, sand, pebbles, and twigs poured from every crease of his torn shirt and doublet and from his breeches and boots. His hair, the stubble of his beard, his moustache, and even his eyebrows were stiff with grime, matted into place with blood; sand gritted in the empty socket of his left eye beneath its leather patch. He coughed and spat the dust from his throat.

  Before him in one direction lay the whitening bones of the city, half-hidden now under gray drifts of sand; beyond them lay the black reg and the ghostly sentinels of tsuroka, already shimmering in the day’s heat. He turned. A couple of chimneys and the corner of a wall rose through the sand like the ribs of an animal. Around his shelter, the dune was broken by a dip, the print of the spells which had saved his life. Everything else was buried under ash-colored dust. In the new light, the decayed and blackened cliff face of the Haunted Mountains wore a brooding, waiting look, as incongruous and horrible as a thoughtful frown on the brow of a half-rotted corpse.

  He had outwitted them and had learned their secret. But the demons of Wenshar were far from finished.

  It took a good deal of courage simply to go up the canyon far enough to get his horse. He was rather surprised to find the beast unharmed where he had left it behind the barricades in the honey-colored temple. In the exhaustion-drugged depths of his unconsciousness, he had felt the storm ebb and had felt the demons go seeking other prey. The echoes of their triumph when they had found it, the terror and the blood of their prey clung in his throat with the back-taste of the dust. He had assumed he’d be walking back to Tandieras. But other than being crusted with dried sweat from a night of terror and half-crazy with thirst, the beast was as the Wolf had left him. Moving slowly, stumblingly, Sun Wolf led him to the rock tanks, where both of them drank and the Wolf washed the numerous shallow gashes that covered his arms and face. Then he saddled up, wrapped on his head veils, and turned the horse’s head back toward Tandieras once again.

  He reached the Fortress shortly before sunset and waited until it was dark to work his way around through the dilapidated gates of the empty quarter.

  But it was not Starhawk who waited for him in the gloom of the abandoned cells. It was Nanciormis, with Kaletha and over a dozen guards and shirdar warriors, to arrest him for the murder, by means of sorcery, of Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth and all those who had gone before.

  Chapter 14

  “IF YOU TELL US who paid you and why,” Nanciormis said quietly, “you could spare yourself a lot of pain.”

  “The hell I would.” The shackles that held Sun Wolf’s wrists extended out to either side of him clinked faintly against the stone of the wall as he tried to shift his shoulders. About the only thing that could be said for the dungeons under Tandieras—stinking of old excrement, crawling with roaches, foul with smoke from the brazier in the corner of his cell—was that they we
ren’t damp. His single eye glinted in the choking murk. “You know as well as I do that Illyra’s going to spare nobody pain who was responsible for killing that wooden-headed brother of hers. Without him she can’t go on ruling the Dunes. Confessing would only buy me her hate instead of her suspicion.”

  The Desert Lord folded his heavy arms, his thick lips pressing taut. “You have more than her suspicion, Captain,” he said. “Your bluff is over. We know.”

  “You what?!”

  Behind him, Osgard, sober for once, his sweat like pig muck in the close heat of the cell, said, “It wasn’t until you came to Tandieras that this started. Nexué didn’t die until you’d come back from Wenshar—by the Three, why we didn’t realize then it was you—”

  “It wasn’t me, rot your eyes!” the Wolf stormed. At the angry jerk of his chains, the guards who crowded in the narrow doorway raised their crossbows. Sun Wolf realized belatedly that, as a wizard, his slightest movement could be grounds for death. He sensed already Kaletha’s spells on the manacles, like a blindfold over certain parts of his mind. Evidently someone believed in taking precautions, anyway.

  Osgard’s face reddened at the contradiction, but Nanciormis merely raised one white-gloved hand. “There’s no need to maintain the charade any longer, Captain,” he said quietly. “I saw you, the night you tried to murder me.”

  “WHAT?” Even in that first shocked instant, Sun Wolf remembered how Nanciormis had evaded certain questions after the attack, had looked away from his eyes, and had spoken to Osgard afterward. “Dammit, man, I was in the Hall when it happened! A dozen people saw me...”