The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  Scorpions covered the chest and the rafter above them, like metal plates sewn on a garment. Starhawk paused for a moment, rubbing her bare hands, loathing the thought of what she must do. It’s do it or go back out and think of something else, she told herself. After the roaches in the jail and the vermin in some of the inns you’ve stayed at, it’s no time to get squeamish now. With cringing fingers she reached forward and picked a jointed brown body off the lid and tossed it aside. It landed with a faint plop in a corner. None of the others moved.

  Starhawk supposed she had done worse things in eight years of soldiering—retrieving the chest of gold pieces one sacked township had sunk in the latrine pit behind the town hall came to mind. But shivering in the cold, ensorcelled darkness as she crouched to force the locks, waiting for the breath of warmth that would tell her that Tazey’s concentration had failed and that she herself was, for all intents and purposes, already dead, she couldn’t think of too many.

  There were thirteen books in one chest, five in the other. Two of them were so large and clumsy she could only carry them one at a time, picking her way back through the loathsome carpet of the pit, to hand them up to Jeryn. Her hands were clumsy with cold, barely able to close around the heavy volumes that she passed up to him in twos and threes, hoping there were no scorpions hidden within the bindings that would revive in the warmer air above. It wasn’t likely—the chests looked tight against moisture, sand, and the small, glue-eating vermin of deserted places. When she was finished, she closed up the chests again, picked a six-foot diamondback off the rungs of the ladder, and scrambled out of the pit, her bruised flesh shuddering with considerably more than cold.

  Jeryn was looking at her, eyes enormous with awe. As she gently shook Tazey out of her trance, the boy whispered, “You’re braver than Uncle Nanciormis—braver than my father.”

  “I’ve just had eight years’ more practice as a looter,” Starhawk said. “Now for God’s sake take a look at my back to make sure none of those things dropped on me, and let’s get the hell out of here. We’ve got a lot more to do tonight.”

  Chapter 15

  FOR THE FOURTH OR fifth time, pain wakened Sun Wolf, jerking him back to awareness of more pain. He changed his half-waking sob into a curse and braced his knees once again to take some of the excruciating tension from his burning shoulders and back and his lacerated wrists; the guards, on the other side of the cell, shifted nervously and raised their crossbows. It was the squat, blond young man and the dark shirdar girl again, he saw—he had lost count of how many times they’d swapped off with the other pair sitting upstairs in the guardroom playing piquet. His knees trembling, the Wolf felt like telling them that if they were tired of the routine, next time he’d go sit in the guardroom for a change.

  It would be something, he thought, if he could only summon up the smallest of go-away spells to keep the roaches and the few big, fat, insolent flies away from the raw flesh of his wounds. But the sorceries in the chains did their job thoroughly. All he could do was shake his cramped arms weakly and curse. He was growing too weary now to do either.

  It was about the seventh hour of the night. He had the rest of the night to get through and all the hours of daylight tomorrow. The thought was far worse than that of whatever death he’d have to endure afterward.

  A draft from the corridor moved the putrid air, and his eyes swam with the smoke. By sunset tomorrow in the desert dryness, he knew he’d be half-crazy with thirst, but now it was lack of sleep that tormented him most—lack of sleep, and the tree of agony rooted in his legs, growing up his spine to his cramped, searing shoulder muscles, and branching out to the red rings of bleeding pain that circled his wrists. Sooner or later his knees were going to give out. And then, he thought, he’d look back on this moment with nostalgic longing.

  Wherever they’d put the Hawk, he hoped she was better off than he.

  The queer, sinking sensation of panic returned at the thought of her.

  She would never have broken as he had.

  That might be, he thought ruefully, because it was unlikely that, had their positions been reversed, he would ever have been an innocent victim. But at heart, he knew Starhawk to be both colder and tougher than he was. Since he had come to love her—since he had embraced the magic that was his destiny—he had discovered in himself a widening streak of sentimentality that his father would have puked to behold—puked first and then beaten him till the blood ran.

  He wondered if she would despise him for breaking down as he had or if she’d guessed what he knew—that his holding out would have made no ultimate difference.

  Why had the demon had his face?

  In the darkness of the corridor outside, something moved.

  Sun Wolf raised his head sharply, and one guard shifted her crossbow while the other turned, casting a swift glance through the stone arch. The reflection of torches from the staircase above had long since sunk into smoky darkness, but, like a gauzy brush of fox fire, white light danced along the cracks in the stone. Then it was gone.

  Exhausted almost past caring, Sun Wolf wrenched his body back away from the door—and that light—as far as he could, forcing himself not to feel the burning scrape of the manacles on his wrists. As he did so, he let out a gasp and molded his unshaven features into what he hoped was a convincing expression of utter shock and horror, as if the light were some threat as much to himself as to the guards, though in point of fact he felt no sense of danger from it at all. The guards looked at one another, then back at him. He threw them a desperate look and hoped to hell they remembered him sobbing and begging Nanciormis for mercy. If I had to go through that, he thought grimly, at least let me get some good from it...Whatever the hell was happening, it would be better than being shot out of hand.

  At least he hoped so.

  After a moment’s hesitation, one guard signed to the other to keep his eye on the Wolf, then stepped cautiously into the corridor to investigate. He saw the girl’s shadow on the wall, the dancing phosphorescence leading her away. The other guard braced himself, crossbow leveled, his eyes never leaving the Wolf.

  Thus he didn’t even see Starhawk as she stepped lightly through the arch behind him with half an adobe brick twisted into the bottom corner of a flour sack. She caught the man before he fell and held onto his crossbow, too, lowering him gently to the rock floor as Jeryn slipped in like a little shadow at her heels.

  The ache of joy flooded Sun Wolf, painful as the rush of blood to a numbed limb, to see her alive and, at least by mercenary’s standards, unhurt; it was so intense that he could only whisper as she came close enough to hear, “Where the hell have you been?”

  She was pulling free the pins which held the wrist chains to the rings in the wall, the rags of her shirt hanging like a beggar’s on her rangy frame and a layer of dust gummed to the bloody filth that coated her swollen face. “I leave the royal ball before the dancing is over to come here and rescue you, and that’s all you can say?”

  He lowered his arm and swore violently to keep from crying out in pain. Starhawk’s arms were gentle, solid, and strong as a man’s. For a moment their eyes met. Then he clasped her to him, gritting his teeth against the agony the movement cost him, holding her as hard as his shaking arms would permit, his face pressed to her sticky hair and the crossbow jammed uncomfortably between their two bellies. He tasted her blood and his own as their split and puffy lips met, regardless of the pain. Then he whispered, “Let’s go.” He knew if he didn’t let go now, he never would.

  Jeryn slipped past them to the darkest corner of the little cell and pushed low down on the wall. A small section of it fell back, and, without a word, the boy ducked in. Chains still dangling from his lacerated wrists, Sun Wolf slipped after him, and Starhawk, ducking through last, crossbow in hand, pulled the door shut behind them.

  Tazey was waiting for them with saddled horses beside the old gate of the empty quarter that led down to the pass. Covered with dirt and soot as she was, Sun Wolf took
her in his arms. He knew where that luring light had come from.

  “Good-by.” Her small hands were cold against his back through the holes in his torn shirt. “I wish you could have stayed. I’ll need a teacher...”

  “Rot good-by,” the Wolf said shortly. “We may be getting the hell out of here, but I’m not leaving until I know what’s behind this.”

  “You don’t—” she began.

  “The hell I don’t.” His single golden eye went from her to Jeryn, holding the horses in the shadows of the broken-down gate. “Aside from the fact that sooner or later Lady Illyra or Kaletha’s going to track us down, I don’t think that thing’s stopped killing. We’ve got no guarantee about who its next victim’s going to be. Since we don’t even know what the range is, it could conceivably be either me or the Hawk or both.”

  From the direction of the main block of the fortress came a distant shout, then a rising clamor and torchlight spinning like mad fireflies along the walls. Starhawk remarked, “Either there’s a skunk in the Hall or they know we’re gone.”

  Sun Wolf glanced out through the broken-toothed maw of the gate to the chiaroscuro of velvet and ice that the moonlight scattered over the twisted land. An elf-owl hooted once from where ocotillo threw its shadows like a skeleton hand across the sand-drift near an old wall; the moon gleamed like a rim of frost on the spines of the Dragon’s Backbone. “There a place we could hole up in the mountains where the horses could be hidden?”

  Jeryn looked blank—he might know every underground tunnel and secret passage in Tandieras, but he’d never stepped willingly outside its walls in his life. Tazey said, “There’s a deserted chapel high up in the side of the Binnig Rock—up there.” She pointed to the dizzying bulk of the half dome. “The trail’s pretty narrow, but it can be done on a horse.”

  He turned to Jeryn. “You think you can find your way up there tomorrow, as soon as you can slip away? I’m going to need somebody to read pieces of those books to me.”

  The boy nodded, dark eyes glowing.

  “Good. Tazey, stay here and keep an eye on things—best you aren’t both missing at the same time.” He swung into the saddle. If Starhawk alone had been there, he probably would have groaned and cursed with pain; but as it was, he only gritted his teeth. “And see if you can’t smuggle us weapons of some kind—and a blanket.” He collected the reins and turned away through the narrow gate to the pewter moonlight of the narrow trail beyond.

  Tazey asked softly, “Will you be all right tonight?” Starhawk said, deadpan, “I think we’ll manage to keep each other warm.”

  “Chief?”

  He turned his head sleepily to look down at the ivory-fine features of the woman who lay in the crook of his arm. The washy dawnlight turned her hair colorless, the bruises on her face almost black. The air was bitterly cold, so that even the harshness of the sacking and saddleblankets in which they were wrapped was welcome. The links of the slip-chain still around her neck jingled softly as she raised a scarred hand to touch one of the few unbruised portions of his face, with a gentleness no one would have guessed who’d seen her brain a man with a mace in battle.

  She said softly, “Thank you.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t have given them whatever they wanted, told them whatever they wanted, to save you?”

  She was silent a long time, while buried thought fumbled its painful way to the surface. The gray light seeping through the chapel’s narrow door to lie over the two ragged fugitives silvered her eyes—he saw them flood with sudden tears. “I never thought anyone would,” she said at last.

  When next they spoke, the light had warmed on the thick tangle of brush and mesquite outside the chapel door, and wavering gleams of yellow and green reflected into the shadowy stone room from the catch pools outside. The slit windows above the little stone altar glowed with the wide nothingness of desert air, five hundred feet above the level of the crumbling talus and rock below. The chapels of the Mother were for those who would fight to reach her, not like the easy, open churches of the Triple God.

  “Why’d you ask Jeryn about his etymology? About the difference between a witch and a wizard?”

  Drowsing on the edge of sleep, Sun Wolf almost laughed. Only Starhawk’s logical mind would bring a question like that out of the afterglow of lovemaking.

  “What is the difference?”

  Starhawk considered the two words for a time. “In the dialect of the north it’s a difference of—of kind of magic,” she said at last. “A wizard is an academic; the word ‘witch’ implies earth-magic, granny-magic sometimes—intuition. In the dialect of the Middle Kingdoms, and here along the cordillera, I’ve noticed that ‘wizard’ is masculine and ‘witch’ is feminine—the way ‘God’ is feminine in the singular and masculine in the plural.”

  “Close,” he agreed, and sat up, shivering a little at the touch of the chill air. “But in the shirdar there’s a different connotation, a pejorative one—the implication that the magic wasn’t yours to begin with. The shirdane is a language of nuances. In it, like in the north, a wizard is an academic, one who studies, a scholar or an engineer. But the shirdane word for ‘witch’ is someone who buys her power, usually in trade for her soul. When they speak of the Witches of Wenshar, they aren’t describing power—they’re speaking of how power was acquired.” He sat cross-legged under the ragged blanket and pushed back the faded strands of thinning hair from his scabbed, unshaven face.

  There was something ironic, Sun Wolf thought, in his utter comfort in this bare stone cell. When he was the wealthiest captain of mercenaries in the West, he’d never have believed he would one day delight in being a ragged, filthy fugitive this way, sitting in a bare stone room with nothing but a half interest in a saddle blanket and four saddlebags full of stolen books to his name. Nothing like a quick glance down into the Cold Hells to make you pleased with life on damn near any terms.

  “It’s the demons of Wenshar that were the source of the Witches’ power,” he went on. “They traded their power, their service, to the Witches—became their servants.”

  “Are you sure?” Starhawk raised herself on one elbow and pulled the saddle blanket awkwardly over her bare shoulder. “Demons are—immortal. And immaterial. There are old legends of people controlling them, but why would they allow themselves to be controlled? We have nothing they’d want.”

  “Don’t we?” His hoarse voice was soft in the watery gloom. “Think about it, Hawk. Demons have no flesh, as we know flesh; no blood; no passions. They are cold creatures, ephemeral, entities unattached to bodies. They can never die—and so they never live. I felt their minds all around me in Wenshar, Hawk; I felt their cold, that seeks after warmth.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

  “They crave heat—not heat as we understand it, or at least not as we understand it consciously, but the heat of the soul, of the blood—the heat of fear, for which they drive beasts and men, if they can trap them, to panic deaths, so they can drink it as it spills out of them; the heat of lust, which leads them to couple in dreams with men and women, feeding their partners the images that they crave, to warm themselves by that mortal fire. And the heat of hate, which is the best of all, because it doesn’t fade with time.

  “The demons in Wenshar became addicted to hate, the way men become addicted to dream-sugar. The Witches of Wenshar fed them, using their magic to open the channels between their minds and the demons’, and the demons found they liked that food. There are earth-demons in many parts of the world, but mostly humankind avoids them, as they avoid humankind. Originally the House Cult of Wenshar may only have sought to control the demons, because their city was built where they lived. But later they sought to bend them to their bidding. Afterward they found there was a price to pay. That was the secret power of the Witches of Wenshar—that the demons would kill whomever they hated. But in return, they had to go on hating.”

  Starhawk glanced over at the untouched books, piled at the foot of the bare stone alta
r. Sun Wolf shook his head.

  “It’s only my guess,” he said. “But the demons knew me for mageborn the minute I entered their city. They tried to get me to take that power, to use it as the Witches did. The Witches gave their hate to the demons, to feed on and to act on, but in doing so they gave them a taste for it. Corrupted them, if you like. Demons are immortal. While Altiokis dominated this part of the world, people would not admit to being mageborn, not even to themselves. Demons have been living in that city for over a century, like roaches, feeding on the piled rot of old hates. They’re coming out of a long starvation.”

  In the glowing blue-green cleft of the doorway, a tiny rock-mouse paused, whiskers aquiver, silhouetted against the colors of leaf and stone. A flurry of doves swept past the entrance like a skiff of blown snow. Starhawk looked down at her hands for a long time.

  “The kids say Nanciormis saw your face on the demon that came for him.”

  Sun Wolf nodded, remembering how, in the darkness of the temple in Wenshar, the demon eyes had glowed golden, like his own. In that moment, when their minds had touched...? He hadn’t forgotten the dead birds found after his own first night spent in this country.

  “I can’t explain it,” he said slowly. “But I think I’d have known.”

  “According to Nanciormis, via Tazey, they didn’t, always. That cuts both ways,” she added after a moment. “The fact that you found the dead birds before the storm doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been Tazey herself. She may well not have known. In the north I’ve heard of knocking-demons, and there’s always a young boy or girl somewhere involved. And she is mageborn.”

  “So’s Kaletha,” the Wolf said. “And if Kaletha’s thirtyish now, she must have been in well into her teens while Queen Ciannis was alive—old enough to have been initiated into the cult, if Ciannis was its last survivor. Particularly if Ciannis was as frail as Nanciormis says and might have suspected she wouldn’t survive a second childbirth.”